mattwalters.net

This is part 2 of my Samsung Blackjack review.  So I’ve now had a little more time to play with my Blackjack and overall I’m still impressed.  I think I’ve spent enough time with it now to be able to speak more towards the battery life and UI.   So … let’s get started.

Battery Life
I can definitely understand why folks were making the comments that they were in regards to the battery life.  It’s a good thing that it comes with two batteries.  The standard battery that it comes with is probably at best a back-up battery.  I let it charge over night and then gave it what I’d call average use throughout the next day.  I probably spent about 30 minutes on phone calls during the day, and occasionally checked out things in the mobile browser, it also was keeping my email and calendar sync’d.  That evening, I had to make a call where I was placed on hold for awhile (total time on the call probably 30-45 minutes) and then the battery went dead on me.  I did realize afterwards that I had left blue-tooth on all day, so I’m sure that drained the battery faster, but still, I was a bit surprised that it didn’t last at least the full day.  Since then, I’ve been using the extended-life battery that came with the phone and battery life hasn’t been an issue for me.  It has a 3 bar battery indicator and it usually still has 2 bars left when I plug it in to charge at night.  I haven’t been leaving blue-tooth on either (I always forget my headset anyhow).  I do make sure to carry the other battery with me just in case I need it for some reason, it’s small enough that it slides easily into my bag.

Input
Well, as I stated in my last post, I’m very glad that it has the thumb-wheel and escape button like the BlackBerry’s do.  This definitely made converting over pretty simple, not to mention it’s a great navigation tool for devices like this (at least if you’re right-handed I suppose).  As for the keyboard, it does fine but it’s not as good as the BlackBerry’s was.  I actually blame this on the shape of the keys more then the layout of special-characters and punctuation.  Sometimes it seems to miss keystrokes, not often, but just enough to be noticeable.  The Missing Sync has been great for keeping my contacts consolidated and helping me transfer files to the device (I just got my 2GB Micro-SD card for it).  I also like that you can tell the phone how you want it to act when plugged into a USB port on your computer.  You can specify that you want it to connect for sync’ing, to act as a mass storage device or that you want it to connect as a modem.  That’s pretty spiffy if you ask me.

UI
The UI is working for me for the most part.  It does seem to go “quirky” on me at times though causing me to cycle the phone off/on.  For some reason the mobile browser will act up sometimes and basically return nothing on web requests.  Rebooting seems to be the only way to get it back to working.  This seems to affect my calendar sync’ing and email pushing (which leads me to believe it’s actually just polling quickly) as well.

Windows Mobile definitely has some ground to make up when compared to the BlackBerry.  It’s not really bad, but RIM got it right.  Their core applications and functionality seem to be “hardened” and continue to respond quite well despite any silliness that running applications might try to do.  Windows Mobile doesn’t protect itself as well it would seem.  But the applications that do come on the device work fairly well.

I especially like the home screen.  It shows my upcoming calendar events and gives me a look-at-a-glance view of SMS, email, etc.  There are roughly 5 icons across the top.  Several icons always stay easy-to-access like contacts and the calendar.  The rest cycle through recently opened applications.  You can also hold in the thumb-wheel from the home screen to get quick access to things like alarms, the Task Manager (to stop applications for example), etc.  It makes a decent attempt at expecting what the user might want to do as well with the soft keys.  The left always stays as the “Start” button (so many other words that would work better there …), the right generally will take you to your contacts listing, but if you just received an SMS txt for instance it will change to take you directly to your messages.

Conclusion
Overall I’m pleased with the device.  It is doing a good job at providing the services I wanted it to.  When compared to the BlackBerry it’s a rough comparison.  Device alone, I think the BlackBerry might be a better device, but when it comes to sync’ing email, calendar, contacts, so far the Blackjack has been easier for me to get running on, as well as tethering it to my MacBook, and it’s good enough on the other stuff to not make you long for your BlackBerry.  So I guess it really comes down to your needs and whether the battery life is acceptable to you.  If you’re the type of person traveling a lot and not able to plug your phone in once a day, the Blackjack is probably not the device for you (you can charge it off a USB connection to your computer if that makes any difference though).