Boomtrends

Samsung Blackjack - Hardware, Go. Microsoft, No!

As an unstaffed consultant, there are certain freedoms such as late morning Friday jogs around the Marina. After oogling at pictures and tech specs of the Samsung Blackjack for the past week, I was ready to get my hands on it! I planned my jog to pass the Cingular store. I really didn’t expect to get my hands on the thing but they had just put the Blackjack on display. Lucky me.

I’ve been in the market for a new phone since I am about to get parole from T-Paperweight and have been seriously considering getting a “smartphone“. With the arrival on the Motorola Q, there has been a rush by to get $200 smartphones to market (T-Mobile Dash, Palm Treo 680, etc). One thing that is holding me back is that I have not found a phone that meets MY REQUIREMENTS (besides being a good phone):

• qwerty keyboard
• fast internet
• multimedia capabilities (mp3, video, decent camera, storage)
• small
• easy software navigation

Qwerty keyboard: Check. Considering how a very challenging it is to find my jeans size at the GAP, I will assume I am of average male GAP shopper size and my hards are proportional. The keyboard was as easy as I can image a 2.3 inch wide keyboard can be to type on.

Fast Internet: Check. This sucka is equipped with the fastest 3G internet you can get on a mobile. The browser supports full html pages so you can waste your life on myspace, while at work.

Multimedia: Half Check. Speakers are fine for a phone but this thing has a proprietary headphone jack. My current Samsung phone also has this and it is EXTREMELY annoying because you are stuck using Samsung headphones (there are no adaptors to a normal 3.5mm headphone jack). These headphones don’t stay in my ears too well, so they are relegated to the original box in my closet.Cingular video worked well, the video recording and photo capabilities are par for the course (1.3mp camera and 320×240 video recording). Lastly there is a microSD slot to tote 2gb of junk with you.

Small: Check. This is one of the most compact smart phones with a full keyboard. The Blackjack feels good to hold and well made. It is not much larger than a closed RAZR and it is light too!

Easy Software: NO! This is a nightmare. I really think Microsoft should have done a better job of hiding the Windows Mobile files from the user. Just be navigating to get to the My Documents folder I found my way into a Windows directory full of mysterious configuration files. I have enough of that crap on my PC and I don’t want to take it with me everywhere. Compared to the ease of the Nokia S60 Symbian software, this is hell in your palm. I had to click too many times to get anything done. Windows does allow you to run many applications at once, but it is not clear how to exit applications so you end up with so many running that the phone becomes SLOW.

Finally, there is some software on the phone that prompts the user if they want to allow internet connection with every data request. When using Google Maps Mobile or Gmail Mobile, I was seriously interrupted every 2 seconds to with a prompt to allow the data connection. I experience this the LG CU500 so it may be a Cingular issue, but regardless it sucks. I dug through all sorts of internet settings looking for a way to always allow internet connections to no avail.

If there is a way to un-castrate the data software, I’d consider it but as a data phone that does not like data, I cannot.This phone’s software lacks the “smart” in the “smartphone” name. Where is a 3G Nokia smartphone?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Mobile, ubiquity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.