Sidekick 3 Top 10 Wants, Needs & Desires

I have a SK3 and although I love the device, I also hate it. I have a strong feeling that most of my hates could be easily fixed through the firmware, but I think that the proprietary nature of the device has blocked it from fulfilling its potential. But trends are short-lived, and the iPhone has taken a lot of the SK4's future potential customers. So a few things that should be improved in upcoming models:

1. Jabber client. There is not one. And therefore no GTalk. And zero word from anyone that this is coming.

2. Fix the reception. It's absolutely terrible: frequent dropped calls, tons of static and interference, weak signals, low volume. And when it craps out, it can take up to 10 minutes to come back on-- no phone, no texts, nothing. It's about 100x worse than any other cellphone I ever had. It's esp. bad when you live in a city (NY) where you're constantly going underground and therefore constantly losing signals. There needs to be a button/feature to immediately find a signal if you know you're somewhere-- like mid-Manhattan-- where there's coverage and the phone is just not connecting to save power (or something).

3. Ability to set MP3s as ringtones: The fact that you can't do this now is nothing but greedy greedy!

4. Add the ability to increase storage for email or texts. I have a 2GB memory card. 100 texts and a very small amount of email storage doesn't work for me. You should be able to use the memory card for extra storage.

5. Custom themes. Again, there are none. I mean, there are custom themes, but only with a hack (that's super easy and works great, btw). You can't even buy custom themes!

6. Add the alarm clock as a default feature. (Seriously. You have to buy it. Yes, I know you can program complicated calendar alerts, but they are difficult and the UI is awful and it's buried in a sub-menu. The alarm clock should be a top-level stand-alone feature.)

7. Fix the totally closed dev environment and add the ability to upload new applications. The phone would be so much cooler if there were more things available for it. There are currently like 25 applications, they cost $7.99 each, and they almost all totally suck.

8. Fix the camera. The current camera is worthless - it's worse than the camera on my old flip phone I got from Sprint four years ago. You also can't set camera pictures as backgrounds (yup).

9. Remove the proprietary headphone jack, which means I never use the mp3 player, and replace it with a standard one. Again, greedy!

10. Be more responsive. There's currently no discussion between the Danger devs and the public. This sucks as it makes me feel like nobody cares what customer priorities are.

I really don't think I'll buy another one, because what I see is a great product being crippled by greed and the desire to suck money from customers, a nickel and dime at a time. OPEN standards. OPEN platforms. Then you might have a product that competes with the iPhone. Otherwise, you basically have a toy for 15 year olds whose parents don't want to buy them a laptop.