Last week, I played with T-Mobile's upcoming Sidekick LX built by Sharp and Sidekick Slide, built by Motorola. Though it's still over a month from their "holiday" release, T-Mobile is acknowledging their existence today with some official pics and specs.
Both are more slender than anything yet seen in the Sidekick family: the $299 swivel-action LX is .86" thick, while the aptly named $199 Slide is even slimmer at .68". I can actually conceive of putting the Slide into my jeans pocket—a first for the notoriously chunky Sidekicks. Both have 1.3 megapixel cameras and microSD card slots that support cards up to 4GB.
The LX's 3" screen is spacious, bright and higher than the others in resolution, at 400 x 240 pixels. (The Slide's perfectly adequate screen is a more typical 320x240.) Typing is a bit easier on the LX, too, since the keyboard area is a bit wider and the keys themselves have more spacing than ever before. The LX is available in dark brown and midnight blue, as you see in the gallery, and comes with a 128MB microSD card—not quite what you're gonna want, but better than nothing.
In case you were wondering, T-Mo mentioned that the Sidekick 3 would be phased out, though the iD would stay in circulation as the most affordable option in the lineup at $49. Also, these Sidekicks bring with them long overdue arrival of MMS for sending photos. That's right, no longer will Sidekick users have to attach photos to e-mails, you know, like it was the 1980s or something.