The Sidekick 4g
What a beautiful phone! Love the physical size, love the shape, it's put together well, the hinge is strong, the keys feel good (though it may be a little fewer keys than I'd want, but if that's my only complaint...)
I'm also a big fan of the screen size. I'd love to purchase a smaller phone than my daily driver. But alas... The world has moved on...
(by the way, if anyone reading this has knowledge of a smaller android/linux phone with a fold-out keyboard, email me a lead and I'll kiss you right on the mouth)
The Basics
The SK4G came out in April of 2011, so I can safely say this is an "old phone" :P
That means it's gonna come with some downsides. You're definitely not getting 5g on this thing any time soon is all I'm saying.
There are two main downsides to this phone. The first is that even once you root it, the best you're going to get is android 2.2.2 (froyo). This is going to severely limit the apps we can use. I'm hoping at some point to figure out how to create an update for it, but that's a huge project that will take a few years at least for me to figure out.
The second big downside is how many of the built-in apps for the SK4G are loaded. Sidekick had a server it communicated with as a middle-man to your phone's internet service (Danger Servers). It got bought out by Microsoft and handled in typical Microsoft fashion (shut down and scrapped for parts) on May 31, 2011.
Truly, I don't know if this is going to be all that much of an issue. This is a low-power phone and a small screen. If you want to text your friends or maybe edit and upload something to a git repository, you're good. This thing isn't running Crysis. Plus, who knows what can be accomplished through making our own apps.
Rooting
No point in re-inventing the wheel. Just follow the tutorial on this page and you're good as gold.
XDA Developers: Superoneclick Root your Samsung Sidekick 4g (no CW)Apps we can still install
All right, so you've just rooted your sidekick. What now?
Well I started installing a couple apps we'll need. Remember! We're going to have to find 2.2.2 compatible .apk's
Terminal Emulator
You're gonna need this if you want to program anything or run any shell commands.
Technically you don't NEED this if you exclusively work using a shell over usb, but honestly... if you're not typing code into a green-on-black terminal on the physical keyboard of a Sidekick, why are you bothering to go through all this trouble?
ES File Explorer
This one is optional because you can use the file explorer for most things that you can't do in the terminal easily (i.e. installing .apk's)
I just like it a lot better and it's easier to get into root directories within this file manager.
SSH Telnet Client
For all your SSH'ing and Telnet needs. I've played a few MUDS on my sidekick over this.
Yeah you can do all of that through the terminal eventually but that takes some setup.
Firefox
Okay so the web browser... kind of works. (Anything old-internet will work perfectly)
The latest compatible version of Firefox for 2.2 is v31.0
There may be a little hiccup with some sites still. I haven't run across many but I have experienced them.
The short and sweet issue is that HTTPS uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption to secure the webpage. In order for websites to be trusted by your browser, it needs to have a certificate that is in the list of trusted CA certificates. This is why we're using firefox, because it's easier to add the new trusted certificates.
- List of Mozilla's approved certificates
I'm not sure where to go from here. I've tried downloading a few and opening them in firefox on the SK4G but it just opens the text of the file, so I'm not exactly sure where it needs to be added.
Knowing how this goes, I'll probably have to find source code and add the files in there and compile/install the apk again -_-
(Optional) ChompSMS
This is the only way I've found to get group MMS messages working properly.
If there's a better way I'll change this out, but if you're using the sidekick's actual phone capabilities, then this has been a good bandaid for many of the missing features.