The myTouch 3G Slide could go either way: A family-friendly Android phone with an awesome Sidekick-y keyboard, or, much like its name, a godawful conglomeration of disjointed parts.
The gist of the myTouch 3G Slide is that it's an Android 2.1 phone running totally T-Mobile software on top, way above and beyond the original myTouch, nearly to the extent of Sony Ericsson or HTC, with custom interfaces and software—it even has different "themes" depending on what you're doing, much like HTC's Sense interface. And it's got what T-Mobile calls an Sidekick-inspired keyboard (odd, since Sharp built the Hiptop/Sidekick, and the Slide's made by HTC). It's the second of clearly many myTouches coming down the road.
The two biggest features of the T-Mobile designed software are the Faves gallery—which is a dedicated application for your 20 favorite contacts, mashing together all of the various ways you can get a hold of them, and giving them priority status when they're trying to get a hold of you with a special LED light and status in the notifications shade—and the Genius button. Yes, the Genius button. (T-Mobile apparently does have the trademark on it.) It's voice command and speech-to-text, that's more extensive than what Google offers by default, and it's powered by Nuance, the guys behind Dragon Dictation. It seemed to work pretty damn well in the quick demo I had.
My major concern is two-fold: The standard one over delayed Android updates for any phone running custom software—one that T-Mobile actually acknowledges and accepts, since with this product they don't necessarily want to be on the cutting edge of Android updates (they want it to be a safe, easy Android phone). The second is that the software might overlap and cut across Android in some confusing ways (the early Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is a poster child for this), even as T-Mobile takes steps like building in Swype text input and including DoubleTwist for music syncing to make it more palatable to a more mainstream user. It's hard to judge overall how effective the interface is without using it extensively, but since the Slide's not coming out til June, they've got plenty of time to integrate the myTouch software more seamlessly with Android. So we'll see. But I dig the hardware quite a bit—especially the keyboard—even without an eye-bleedingly high res screen.
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