Samsung SGH-i607 BlackJack Review

Just like T-Mobile’s Dash and Verizon’s Motorola Q, the BlackJack is a Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone slab sporting a 320 by 240 screen, a full keyboard and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the back. In many ways, it’s a cross between those two other phones. Like the Dash, it’s a quad-band world phone, it’s black, and it’s almost the exact same size. Like the Q, it uses a high-speed national cellular network rather than Wi-Fi, the keys are long slanted ovals, and it has a handy scroll wheel on the side as well as cursor keys for navigation. At 4.5 by 2.3 by .5 inches and weighing 3.5 ounces, it’s smaller and lighter than both the Dash and the Q.

Cingular’s high-speed network goes truly portable with the new Samsung BlackJack, an excellent little handheld for folks looking for a Blackberry-style device with more speed and multimedia features.

All Windows Mobile 5 Smartphones work basically the same, but Cingular and Samsung have added their own line to the familiar “Windows Mobile Blackberry-killer” song with some new software. Rather than the usual ClearVue Microsoft Office viewers, the BlackJack includes the much slicker Picsel Viewer, which in my experience handles complex PDF documents better. There’s still no Microsoft Office document editor, but at least the BlackJack comes with a note pad program. Cingular, though, has certified the Blackjack for their Cingular Video service, letting you access streaming clips of CNN and HBO content. You can also download an XM Radio streaming application, and there’s an RSS reader too. The bundled OZ instant messaging program supports AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! IM; a cross-application search utility is also built-in. The Dash and Q don’t come with these things. All this software means the 64 MB BlackJack only has 31 MB free for your own software, though. That should be enough for most people, but thankfully the Dash comes with twice as much storage memory.

The BlackJack’s battery life is going to appall anyone used to EDGE phones, but it’s par for the course for a 3G device. Continuous talk time is 3 hours 51 minutes. Yes, it’s shorter than the Cingular 8525, but the 8525 is also a lot more bulky.

The BlackJack’s 220 MHz Samsung processor runs, as expected, a little faster than the T-Mobile Dash’s 200 MHz processor in video benchmarks. But unlike the 400 MHz Cingular 8525, the BlackJack has some trouble with multitasking. If you try to play music over Bluetooth in the background, other applications get quite slow, and you hear occasional pops, clicks and dropouts if you’re trying to talk on a Bluetooth headset and surf the Web over Pocket Internet Explorer at the same time.

The BlackJack also makes a dandy music player, as it supports protected and subscription WMA music from stores like Urge, Napster, and Yahoo!, and plays music over Bluetooth wireless headphones. You can sync music over from Windows Media Player, put it on a MicroSD memory card, or drag and drop tracks using mass storage mode, where the connected BlackJack appears as a hard drive on your desktop. I was annoyed to see there’s no adapter for the oddball headset jack to use wired headsets other than Samsung’s included, very poor-quality earbuds. (I’ve heard such an adapter is coming in the future.) Video in Windows Media Player seemed occasionally jerky, but I’m glad that it plays in full screen, unlike on the Motorola Q. Sling Player Mobile doesn’t work on the Blackjack quite yet, but Sling Media told me they’re working on a fix. Interestingly, the BlackJack plays Cingular’s streaming Cingular Video clips, which are in RealVideo rather than Windows Media format, as well.

So, should you pick the BlackJack or the Cingular 8525? The Blackjack is a better phone, and works better using just one hand. On flip-side the 8525 is a more powerful handheld computer. The BlackJack is also cheaper: $199.99 with a two-year contract, just like the T-Mobile Dash. I’ll stick with the 8525 as my Editor’s Choice recommendation because of its super-duper, multi-network high-speed power. But the Blackjack securely takes the same place among Cingular’s offerings that the Dash and Q have adopted on T-Mobile’s and Verizon’s network: a portable, flexible, e-mail and music focused PDA/phone that’s good enough for most uses. If the BlackJack doesn’t score a perfect 21, well, 20 is still usually a winning hand.

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