Saturday, December 29, 2007

Moronic Mobile

I recently was forced to get a new celphone due to failure in my much beloved Samsung. Since I plan on getting a data plan in addition to my regular celphone service, and I'm a T-Mobile customer, I decided to go with the Sidekick Slide. I have used Blackberries before and have not been impressed.

I'm not impressed with the Sidekick Slide either. It's been functioning well, and the features work well. But, apparently starting last night and continuing into today, things have been not so well.

I tried to return a friend's voice mail, the call did not ring at all, and found out that all my contacts were gone. Not only that, all my notes and events and calendar entries were all gone as well. So, I called customer support and found that if you do not have data services, if you turn your phone off for too long, apparently 8 hours is too long, then your phone will reset it's internal memory and wipe everything out. Yes, that's right, your phone will wipe everything out for no reason whatsoever. Having data services just means that every time you turn the phone on, it'll load from the server backing up all your personal data.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want my phone deleting everything whenever it feels like it. I also don't like the idea that the phone is automatically transferring all the information on it to some server.

Also, remember how I mentioned that the call did not ring through? Apparently, another friend tried calling me multiple times last night and my phone never once rang, lit up, vibrated, or anything. I have my Sidekick Slide set to vibrate and light up everytime I get a call. My phone seems to have decided to switch to silent running for no reason. I didn't make the switch, the settings are quite convoluted to get to so I guarantee it wasn't some random accidental hitting of a button. The phone just decided it wanted to switch to "Do Not Disturb." I did not find this out until after I tried to set an appointment for my heater to get fixed and went to check why I hadn't gotten a call back and was told I missed two calls. The phone had done nothing. I double checked all my settings and discovered that the phone had switched itself to silent running. Now, just an hour before the calls last night that I missed, an hour in which I did not touch my phone, I had received an incoming call and my phone had reacted.

So, in conclusion. I cannot recommend the Sidekick Slide. It wipes it's memory for no reason. It sends all information on it to some server if you have data services because they know it will wipe all your information out, which means your personal info is available to anyone with access to that server. And it randomly changes your settings without any input from you.

It is comfortable, it has a lot of nice features, it's got good speakers and a decent display, but the most basic feature: your contact list, is an utter and abysmal failure.

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