I purchased a Samsung BlackJack recently (just yesterday in fact). I suppose my thoughts on it are somewhat limited for the time being, but hopefully I’ll be able to write up a more thorough review eventually.

So far I’m very impressed though. Most of the people that I first told about my purchase immediately responded with either “the battery life sucks” or “you’ll have to tell me what you think of the battery life.” So far … not really seeing what they’re talking about. For one thing, the phone comes with two batteries (one normal and one extended life) and an external charger so you can charge whichever isn’t currently in your phone. To some extent the fact that the phone comes with two batteries would seem to strengthen their implications, but still, unless the phones battery life starts really nose diving over time, it’s doing good for me still after 24 hours (on the extended life battery).

I think my charging habits might be a little different then most folks though. I tend to plug my phone in to let it charge every night while I sleep, so a phone has to have a super short battery life in order to bug me (less then one day of normal use). But anyhow, I can write more reliable information on the battery at another time.

Getting up and running on the phone has been a breeze. I’m having a much easier time then I was with my BlackBerry 8700c. With the BlackBerry, which I still consider a great device, it was pretty difficult to get any sort of decent calendar snyc’ing or tethering going on if you didn’t have an Exchange account, and it was just recently that you were able to change your reply-to address on outgoing emails (on a per-email basis that is).

With the BlackJack, I have access to POP3 and IMAP email (which is nice) and can take advantage of the Push service (offered by Cingular) for my GMail account. I was also able to use GCalendarSync to sync up my Google Calendar (bi-directional sync over the air). So it’s almost Exchange-like as far as my email and calendar functions go now.

I was also able to quickly get setup for tethering my MacBook and BlackJack, allowing me to connect to the Internet via my phone. This was another issue I had with the BlackBerry that lead to me participating in Alex King’s BlackBerry Bounty. If you stumble across this post while trying to figure out how to tether your BlackJack and MacBook, I used this post and this one to figure it out.

After getting the tethering up, and email/calendar, I looked for a good way to bring my contacts from GMail over to it (which I had spent a decent amount of time de-dup’ing and formatting, etc). This (and some other snyc’ing concerns) led me to find The Missing Sync for WindowsMobile. After exporting my Contacts from GMail (in Outlook format) I was able to import them into my MacBooks Address Book. I had to do a little further formatting because of how GMail stores names as one field, but that was easy. Anyhow, once they were in my Address Book, I was able to use The Missing Sync to sync up my contacts to my BlackJack (the program sync’s other items on the device as well). After that, I was up and fully running.

All things considered (Internet searches, dead ends, etc) I probably spend 2.5-3 hours getting all of that setup the way I wanted it. I’m now very happy with my device and it’s chugging along nicely for me. I don’t think that’s bad at all.

Anyhow, I’ll try to get more into my thoughts on the interface and input mechanisms (I’m so glad it has a thumb-wheel like the BlackBerry) in a later post, as well as revisit the battery life topic. I definitely think some more time will need to be spent with the device to really figure that out.