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Geared towards the young and hip, the messaging-centric (e.g. IM, texting, e-mail) Sidekick line has become thinner and more compact with each succeeding generation. This is especially true of the Slide, T-Mobile's best Sidekick since the original. The carrier's just introduced a new version of this smartphone.

The Sidekick Slide Scarlet, with a black finish with scarlet accents, features MySpace Mobile, e-mail, Web browsing and (of course) various messaging applications like instant, text and picture messaging. It sells for $199.99 with a two-year service agreement.

Although Sharp built and designed all Sidekick models over the last six years, including T-Mobile's other newer Sidekick model, the LX, the Slide is - for the first time - the work of another company, Motorola

The Slide, a quad-band world phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), is also the first Sidekick to deviate from this smartphone's usual swivel-screen-to-reveal-a-QWERTY-keyboard design. Instead, the Sidekick LX's display, as the name implies, slides up to reveal its keyboard.

It also sports a 2.4-inch display with a 320 x 240-pixel QVGA resolution and a 1.3-megapixel camera. There are also game controllers, Bluetooth, a miniSDHC card slot, which currently supports up to 4GB expansion cards, and 128MB of internal memory. It's also got a media player.

It measures 4.6 x 2.4 x 0.68 inches and weighs 5.3 ounces

A month ago, Microsoft completed its purchase of Sidekick smartphone-maker Danger, an acquisition announced by the companies in February. Rather than Windows Mobile, which Redmond's been pushing in one form or another for the past eight years, the Sidekick runs on Danger's own hiptop platform.

And whereas Microsoft found most of the success for its smartphone platform with mobile professionals and the enterprise, the Sidekick's been popular with consumers, especially with younger demographics and the less technically savvy. That's a market Microsoft is keen to exploit, in part through the expertise obtained with Danger.

Danger is being absorbed into Microsoft's Premium Mobile Experiences team, a group within Mobile Communications Business of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft. Premium Mobile Experiences is led by corporate VP Roz Ho. Danger co-founders Matt Hershenson and Joe Britt will join the new organization, reporting directly to Ho.

Danger employees will continue to work from their current offices. Financial terms of the acquisition were not been disclosed.