Motorola's SideKick Slide Kicks Itself Where It Hurts

Motorola's entrance to T-Mobile's SideKick family of messaging devices is not producing the intended good vibes. Instead, users across the Web are reporting power outages and hard resets when the Slide's slide is slid.Ouch. Talk about a side-kick to the face. The Motorola SideKick Slide is a different take on the age-old SideKick design. Rather than have a screen that swivels open, the Slide's screen pushes upward to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard underneath for composing emails, text and IM messages. It is also smaller than the original SideKick, making it more pocket friendly.

Cool design aside, however, it looks as though some engineering and/or manufacturing glitches are making the Slide not such a good choice for messaging fanatics. In user forums around the Interwebs, sad tales are pouring in. Those tales all tell the same story. When users slide the Slide's screen up to get at the keyboard, the phone is re-booting, or just plain going dead.

If you think re-booting your phone every so often isn't such a big deal, consider this. The Slide uses T-Mobile's over-the-air back-up system to store user data, such as contacts, bookmarks, etc. That means if your Slide reboots while you're out of network coverage, it won't be able to communicate with the back-end servers and your user data will be unretrievable until you re-enter a T-Mobile service area.

Apparently when the screen is moved, the battery can lose touch with the contacts, causing the power outage. Because the Slide was designed to perform a hard reset if the battery is pulled while the phone is running, all user data is immediately lost. Motorola and T-Mobile have been made aware of the issue, but have not addressed it publicly, nor made any sort of replacement or exchange policy known.