We got our hands on one of the new Sidekick 2008 (Gekko) devices to check out. Here’s a hands-on video with it:

If you hadn’t heard, it’s finally time for the Sidekick LX Video OTA to roll out to everyone. Over the last week or two the update has been slowly rolling out. The pioneer people that got the users should also receive a new update that brings them up to the latest version. So yes, it’s finally here guys. It’s rolling out randomly, not based on location at all. Good luck trying to guess when you’ll get the OTA. Just sit tight and we’ll all be enjoying the new video and browser goodness before too long.

What if a PSP got together with a Sidekick? Well, design student Samuel Lau thinks they’d go together perfectly. He’s come up with a design for a PSP with a screen similar to the Sidekick Slide, and a keyboard hidden underneath.

Some words from the designer, Samuel:
-Hope to have 50,000 views and 1000 comments.
-Then i will send this video directly to Sony for consideration.
-Once i reach the target, i will make another official proposal video to Sony.
-I am also raising fund for my education which cost about C$50,000. Hope if Sony like my idea and uses it, they pay half of my education fee.
-Hope i can see the real thing before Christmas 2009 (Fingers cross)!
-So be fast, spread the words!
-Last of all: YOU can make it happen!!!

Here’s his video for Sony to take a look at:

via yanko

Everyone keeps asking where their video OTA is for the Sidekick LX. It’s still in the pioneer phase right now. This means it will roll out to a small percentage of the Sidekick LX users first. Things will be tested to make sure nothing is wrong, and then it will roll out to everyone. The OTA has been in the pioneer phase for about a month, with no word on an official full roll-out date yet. It’s unclear as to why things aren’t rolling out to everyone, but it could be anything from a small bug, to larger problems on the back-end servers. Hang in there guys. It’s totally worth the wait!

The video above from Crunchgear shows the unboxing of the Tony Hawk Sidekick LX Limited Edition. If you are a T-Mobile customer, these devices are already available. If you aren’t a T-Mobile customer already, you should be able to get it on July 16th, but sign up over on www.sidekick.com to get an email reminder when it does go on sale for the general public.

One of the new features that comes with the 4.6 OTA for the Sidekick LX is the “Quick Find”. Basically this is a super quick way to search your entire Sidekick for something. Here’s a quick video of it in action:

Sidekick LX Quickfind feature

So everyone has seen the video recording capabilities of the Sidekick LX, but what about video playback? We converted a video into .3gp and tossed it on the Sidekick to see how it looked. Surprisingly it turned out pretty good! It’s not unreasonable to think that people could be watching TV shows and music videos on their Sidekick. We won’t say movies are a possibility because we haven’t done any testing to see just how much of an impact this has on battery life. Anyways, enough talk, here’s the video:

Sidekick LX Video Playback from HiptopVideos on Vimeo.

Sidekick LX New Browser Features

I’m sure everyone is clamoring to see more samples of what video from the Sidekick LX looks like. We’ve got another for you. This is what it looks like when uploaded to YouTube and re-encoded:

Here’s the original video that will play if you have Quicktime installed:

If you want to see the original .3gp file that was recorded, click here to download.

Here’s a preview of the Sidekick LX Video Recording quality, as you can see it’s postage stamp sized (176×144 px) and the quality isn’t even close to fantastic. We’ve opted not to embed a youtube video as it looks even worse when they Compress and stretch it out, but we’ve posted a Quicktime player of the raw video right off the LX. thanks to Doeboynmek over at the Powered By Danger forums for the video sample.

You’ll need Quicktime to view the embedded video.

Just for kicks, let’s double the size of the video to (352×288px)

You’ll need Quicktime to view the embedded video.
Doesn’t look great, but you can still make out everything in the video, and at least it’s not postage stamp sized video.

As you can see, there’s nothing to get overly excited about but we guess it’s better than nothing at this point.