In addition to the keyboard and the touch display, the phone sports a handful of hardware keys and an optical mouse. The Sidekick shakes up the standard Android hardware keys by adding a Jump Key rather than a Search key (in addition to Home, Back and Menu, of course). If you remember the older Sidekicks, you might recall the Jump Key, which takes you to a list of your favorite programs, which you can customize to taste (see "New Sidekick OS").

It took me just a second to get a grip on where these various hardware buttons are located: The Home button is in the upper left corner, the Jump key sits just below it, while Menu and Back are on the right side in the upper and lower corners, respectively.

I had a hard time getting the hang of the optical mouse, however. Its surface area isn't large enough to comfortably use as main source of navigation, and I felt like its response time was a bit slow.

On the left spine of the phone, you'll find the volume rocker, the 3.5-mm headphone jack and the power button. On the right, you'll find the camera shutter key and the micro-USB port. Unfortunately, the microSD slot is located just below the battery, which you'll have to remove to get to it.