Sidekick II Review Comments and Questions

Not too long ago I did my review on the T-Mobile Sidekick II (which was featured on Lockergnome). Today I received an e-mail from April at Columbia University with some comments about my review and a couple of questions. Allow me to share that e-mail:

Hi Chris,Nice review. I agree on most after my 4 days of use except that my friends have found the phone quality to be worse than last time around…also, the weight and size are not improvements in my book….I was hoping for noticeably lighter and shorter rather than longer…. What you didn’t mention is the support for use on non-US gsm networks, a huge plus for me, a frequent traveler - also a possible boon for business users once they can sync. I’ll be curious to see how it works in practice however… Also, I noticed my device freezes when entering/exiting the phone, something it never did before….requires a reboot but I guess that’s better than the days of sim slippage…..

I had a couple of issues I wanted you opinion on if you have a minute or two:
-have you tried to sync to outlook? What do you think
-whats so difficult about enabling java support? Is it a pipe dream? I was very disappointed to see that lacking.
{April}

Allow me to answer your questions, April:

have you tried to sync to outlook? What do you think

Not with the Sidekick II. I am no longer using Outlook for e-mail.

whats so difficult about enabling java support? Is it a pipe dream? I was very disappointed to see that lacking.

I’m disappointed as well. Especially considering that most of my web browsing is done on the Sidekick these days. Here’s where I’ll need to get semi-technical. The Sidekick doesn’t actually go to the web site(s) you tell it to. It calls on a service (which is managed by Danger, Inc.) that pulls the web page(s) you request down to a bank of servers, formats said web page(s) to fit on the Sidekick (and adhere to the limitations of the Sidekick’s web browser), and then that service sends the web page(s) to your Sidekick.

This is where the JavaScript issue comes in. JavaScript is processed by the client (and not the server). For example, PHP and Perl (both are used on chrisshort.net) and server-side scripting languages meaning that all the processing is done by the server once a web page is accessed. JavaScript is a client-side scripting language. This means that the current Danger, Inc. web browser service would have to recognize JavaScript and send that on to the Sidekick. Then, the Sidekick would have to process that JavaScript. This requires two things (basically):

1) The Sidekick has the processing power to parse and display JavaScript.
2) The Sidekick web browser has a Java scripting engine of sorts. This requires storage space.

Until certain things are done by Danger, Inc. (and maybe to the Sidekick II or future incarnations of the Sidekick) JavaScript won’t be accessible. There is a lot of work to be done in this department and I’m not sure how far along Danger, Inc. is with that work (if someone knows please fill me in). Sad but true.

I hope that answers your questions, April. Thanks for stopping by chrisshort.net.