T-Mobile Sidekick LX

The Sidekick LX, which we reviewed when it first launched last October, is a messaging limousine, a gigantic device that's 5.1 inches long with a 3 inch, 400 by 240 pixel screen.

Its 1,540-mAh battery lets it run for almost 11 hours of talk time. Compare that with the new Sidekick 2008, a more compact model, at 4.7 inches, that has the same 400 by 240 pixel resolution on a 2.6 inch screen and achieves about 8 hours of talk time on its smaller battery.

Check out our original review for the basic details of the Sidekick LX. We'll focus on the 2008 improvements here.

We dinged the Sidekick LX for not supporting stereo Bluetooth for music, video recording and playback, or Yahoo! Mail. All those features are here now. The LX paired easily with our Plantronics Pulsar 590 stereo headset to play unprotected AAC, MP3, and WMA files.

The LX also plays small video files like the ones sent in MMS messages. It doesn't do a good job of playing larger files, though; even our relatively undemanding 320 by 240, 15 frame per second 3GP test file was jerky and choppy. Video capture is strictly for picture messaging, but it's here. The LX now takes wobbly, pulsing, and grainy 176-by-144 videos of up to 20 seconds in length and stores them on a memory card. Our 8GB SanDisk microSD card worked fine as a source and destination for music, photos, and videos.