The Design and Use of the T-Mobile Color Sidekick
             Communication is important. Many people use cell phones and electronic devices everyday to communicate with their families and friends. One type of cell phone that many hard of hearing or deaf people use, along with hearing people, is the T-Mobile Sidekick from Danger, Inc. They use it because not only it has a phone feature like all cell phones, but it also has an instant messaging program that serves as an alternative to a phone for people who cannot hear well. The Sidekick will be examined, to see if it is beneficial to a person who owns one, by following some of the main designing principles derived from Donald A. Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. The Sidekick has many things wrong about it that are often overlooked and it also has many great features, such as its email service that makes the device a cell phone/pager in one.
             The Sidekick comes in a spiffy colorful box from T-Mobile and it includes a re-charger, a wrist strap and a cover. Does the Sidekick have an excellent sense of usability? That has yet to be determined in this paper. The appearance of the pager has customers vying for it. Its silver body with a swivel LCD screen that rotates clockwise 180 degrees around the hinge, that sits about a couple of centimeters from the top of the phone, makes a person want to get his/her hands on what's exposed when the LCD is flipped – a QWERTY keyboard. When the LCD screen is swiveled upside down, the contents on the screen will also flip to make reading easier. A clickable scroll wheel is embedded inside the right center of the device where the user's thumb might roam over when the hand is holding the pager. Inside the wheel, lies a multi-colored tiny light bulb to display changing colors used for feedback to the user. Placed on the top right corner of the pager, which is directly above the flashing scroll wheel, exists an 11-row vent in...