October 28, 2006

Sidekick 3: Ultimate Moblogging Device?

So I picked up a T-Mobile (Danger) Sidekick 3 recently and have switched over to using it as my main mobile phone and portable device. It took me a little while, but after jumping through a lot of hoops, I was finally able to get our mobile blogging app (KABLOG) partially running on it. So far the biggest problems I've encountered are:

  • No MMAPI camera support. This means I need to write special code in order to capture photos from the Sidekick's camera. I have not done this yet because...
  • Very poor image quality from the 1.3 megapixel camera. Colors are washed out, images lack sharpness and detail even on the highest quality settings. My Nokia 6630 has the same raw pixels but produces much more readable images
  • Downloading j2me apps to a Sidekick requires a special "developer key" so that if I want to distribute my app, I can currently only distribute to other developers (or strike up a business relationship with Danger and T-Mobile, which is probably unlikely.)

So is the Sidekick the ultimate moblogging device? No, but it could be if these problems are addressed. The wide screen and qwerty thumb keyboard are great for typing out longer posts. The built in web browser is fairly well tuned for viewing ordinary web pages on a small screen, which makes browsing blog postings nice. Posted by todd at October 28, 2006 08:12 AM