Samsung Blackjack – Continued

March 5, 2007

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).

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Samsung BlackJack

February 28, 2007

Samsung BlackjackI 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.

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Wii – Continued

January 28, 2007

I’ve had a little more time to play around with the Wii now and was able to pick up a few extra games this afternoon for it. I’m still very pleased with it, and really surprised by some of its features. Here are some of my thoughts about the console and the games I purchased.

Console
The WiFi connectivity is nice. I was wondering if I was going to have to run another CAT5 cable towards my TV or get a hub or something (I already have 1 line running to my TiVo). So it was nice to find out that it had WiFi built in. I had a little bit of trouble with it losing its connection, but then I saw this comment on Alex’s blog which recommended changing the router up to channel 11. This seems to have fixed the connectivity issues that I was having, that or the Wii got used to my network, either way it doesn’t seem to fall off anymore. I will admit I was a little surprised to see that it didn’t have a built in DVD player (like the PS2, etc), but I guess their disc’s might be in a different format or something. It’s built in photo-viewer (which will read images off the SD card you can put into the console) works decently, it’s nothing special but it’s not bad either. The controls are great. I was concerned that they just wouldn’t feel natural for a gaming system, but I was very wrong.

So far from what I’ve seen, there doesn’t seem to be much of a way to play with friends over the Internet, but I haven’t had time to really investigate it, and if someone comes across this post that has more details on this, please let me know as I’d be pretty excited to be able to do this.

Wii Sports
This is the set of games that comes packaged with the Wii. It includes Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf, and Boxing. So far I’ve mostly been enjoying Boxing, Tennis, and then Bowling/Golf. I really just started playing Tennis late this afternoon, but it’s quickly becoming my favorite game of the set. Boxing is good, but the punches just aren’t quite fast enough in-game for what I’m throwing in real life. As for Golf, I’ve never actually played real golf, but it’s a fun game to sort of relax and play. You do have to keep control of your speed though, what I’d consider a “real” golf swing goes off the meter in the game. Baseball is tough, all you’re really doing is either hitting or pitching. Pitching on it is extremely easy, and hitting is extremely tough. Swinging at just the right time to not hit a foul ball is next to impossible for me. Although I will say that Baseball is a great example of seeing just how in tune the controller is with your hand movements. You hold it just like a bat and if you bring it back like you’re about to swing, then do that wobble thing that you always see batters do, you can see the bat in the game follow your movements, it’s great/impressive.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves
Honestly, this game is just sort of silly. It’s actually a slew of mini games. However, it is good for something that won’t tax your brain, and it gets you used to all the different ways you can use the controller(s).

Rayman Raving Rabbids
Complete insanity. Raving Rabbids somewhat reminds me of WarioWare: Smooth Moves in that it’s somewhat mini-games (although not quite as mini as WarioWare). Some of them are somewhat challenging from a coordination perspective, some are completely simplistic, and some just make you laugh so hard it’s difficult to complete the “mission.” I’m glad I purchased it though, it’s good fun.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
I was really worried that I’d end up regretting having purchased this game. I haven’t owned a Nintendo since the original NES (and the only system I’ve owned between the NES and my Wii is a PS2 which I rarely ever play), but I have played some of the Zelda variations through the years on friends systems. I haven’t liked any of them since the original Zelda on NES (even if it’s graphics were horrible by today’s standards). All that being said though, I am REALLY enjoying this game. I put it in figuring that I might play for a few minutes and then go back to some Wii Sports … about 3-4 hours later, I was still playing it. It’s not overly action packed (at least with how far I’ve been able to get into it so far) but it’s neat getting to swing a sword around, do some quests (yes, I’m one of the geeks that had multiple high level characters on EverQuest and World of Warcraft before quitting, so I can get into the questing stuff). I can’t quite put my finger on it exactly, but something about this game really intrigues me and makes me want to keep playing to see “what’s next.”

Whelp, time for me to get back to playing some more ;) My arms are already sore, I’m sure that’ll feel good tomorrow, hehe.

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Wii

January 28, 2007

So I finally went ahead and got a Wii (Alex’s post, and talking to Pat finally tipped me towards getting one). I had been talking about it on and off for a little while now. I must admit that I’m pretty impressed with it, from it having built-in WiFi, to the precise/sensitivity of the controls, it’s great. As others have been saying, it can give you a workout as well. So far I only have the games it comes with (Wii Sports), but they’re pretty fun. I’d have to say that boxing is my favorite so far, although I’m pretty decent at bowling on it.

Anyhow, if you’ve been sitting on the fence about whether to get one or not, so far given my experience with it, I’d have to say go get one. It’s something to kill time with / have fun with, and mild exercise at worst ;)

I’ll try to post some more about it after I’ve had some time to play with some of the other features like internet connectivity and other games.

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BlackBerry 8700c

April 19, 2006

BlackBerry 8700cI recently decided to purchase a BlackBerry 8700c from Cingular and felt it was time to give it a bit of a review. So far I’m over-all pleased with the device. Alex King recently bought one as well, it might be helpful to read his thoughts in addition to these if you’re considering purchasing one.

If someone asked me whether or not I thought they should purchase the device, I would most likely respond that it’s a great device, but there is no single perfect device for all users. As with any of these types of things, it would be good to go to a store and get your hands on one so that you can decide for yourself whether it is right for you or not. Be sure to ask plenty of questions and get the answers to them. It’s not a cheap purchase and you’re going to be bummed if you spend this much money and it doesn’t meet your needs.

Here are some quick lists of what I like and what I don’t:

    What I like:

  • Thumb Wheel: Man I didn’t think I’d really like the whole thumb wheel thing because I’d heard some people complain about it from time to time, but if you ask me, it’s what makes the device almost. From almost anywhere in the UI you can click the thumb wheel to either execute an operation (i.e. opening an application) or use it to bring up a menu and select your option
  • Escape Key: This is kind of hand in hand with the thumb wheel. It’s placement by the thumb wheel lends itself to one handed operation quite nicely.
  • Internet Connection Speed: It operates on Cingular’s GSM network for high-speed data transfer. Because of this the pages load fairly quickly. It’s no broadband connection, but I’d say it could be compared to most handheld devices connected to a wifi connection.
  • UI: I’m using the default cingular skin on mine (with some icons moved around and hidden) and find it fairly easy to navigate. The location of items is fairly intuitive and after the first few hours with the device I don’t really have to search around for anything any longer. I like the arrangement of things as well, such as being able to see my SMS text messages, emails, open GTalk conversations, etc in the messages section
  • GTalk: They did a pretty slick job with this. I installed it and was up and running in no time. It feels much like the desktop application in that you can see your buddies, their status and start conversations with them. You can see the conversation history and when the other user is typing. Conversations are even kept in the Messages section where your email shows up, etc (1 conversation = 1 entry in the list).
  • “Holster Awareness”: I totally love that the device knows when it’s in the holster or not and the fact that you can set it to vibrate if it’s in the holster, or ring if it’s not. I can’t tell you how many times with my cell phone I would set it to vibrate then set it down when I got home on something like a pillow or a seat cushion and then missed calls because I couldn’t hear it going off.
    What I don’t like:

  • Multiple Email Account Handling: Cingular/BlackBerry will gather email from up to 10 email accounts for you and push it to your BlackBerry. This is alright, but as Alex King has found, it’s a pain if not impossible to set up multiple from addresses when you’re replying to or composing email addresses. I’ve tried BBReply, but it doesn’t work on the OS Version that is running on my BlackBerry. UPDATE: I’ve somewhat overcome this. Here’s a how-to for setting up BBReply on the 8700 that worked for me.
  • Synchronization: Since I’m not using my BlackBerry with an Exchange server, my options to synchronize seem pretty limited. I don’t run Outlook locally or anything. I have been using the calendar on my BlackBerry, mainly out of convenience since it’s always with me, but there are definitely times where I’d prefer to set up events on my computer and just have it synch up. Supposedly Yahoo! and BlackBerry are getting together to offer tighter integration, once that happens I think this point will be mostly addressed.
  • Bluetooth with a headset: I’m thinking this might be mostly newbie error, but for some reason if I am not on a phone call and I holster my blackberry, it disconnects from my headset after a short period of time. This is pretty annoying to be honest. But I can’t find any kind of a idle timer for the bluetooth connection or anything
  • I find the speakerphone to only be “so-so.” If you and the person you are speaking to are in relatively quiet environments it can work nicely (I was even ok in my car with the music off). However there was once where the person I was speaking with had a lot of background noise and the BlackBerry wouldn’t turn on the mic when I spoke so they were having a lot of trouble hearing me (this seemed to be the case at least).
    Here are a few quick tidbits that have helped me with the device:

  • Pressing Alt-Esc works much like Alt-Tab on the PC and Mac. It’s nice for moving quickly between applications
  • You can use the “CAP” key much as a shift key which will allow you to highlight text or multiple items in a list so that you can delete/copy/paste
  • Alt-[Thumb Wheel Click] on the home screen will allow you to move icons around or hide/unhide icons
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Addiction …

April 9, 2006

Well, it’s about time I admitted to it. I am addicted … to gadgets. It’s entirely out of control, here are some of my purchases over the past year or so:

  • HP Pavilion dv1000 Laptop
  • WiFi Sniffer: Not just a simple key fob one, this one has a display that tells me if the network is open, etc
  • Maxtor 250GB External USB Hard Drive
  • Motorola RAZR Cell Phone
  • Bluetooth Headset
  • TomTom Vehicle GPS/Navigation System
  • XM Radio
  • PlayStation 2
  • the list continues although it is smaller purchases from this point on…

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I really like most of the purchases I’ve made (only real exception I see in the list is the PS2). The RAZR is great, and it’s kind of cool because like I can hook it into my laptop for instance and use it to connect to the internet if I can’t find a WiFi spot, or my TomTom system can grab control of it and get Weather & Traffic information. So for the most part I don’t regret the purchases, but … wow. It’s not like my life couldn’t go on without any of the above. I think what really bugs me about it is that in general it’s expensive stuff, heh.

It just doesn’t seem to have an end. I’m now having to hold myself back from getting a blackberry. Do I really need one? Not especially, I mean, I’d replace my RAZR with it if I were to buy one. It would be nice to use it for email, txt’ing etc (due to the thumb keyboard) while I’m out and about. But honestly, what I probably really need in my life right now is to become more disconnected rather then connected to the internet.

… must … stop … purchasing … gadgets … *sigh*

UPDATE:
Oh, I forgot these on the list above:

  • Nikon D100
  • Professional Flash
  • 50mm, 18-70mm, 100-200mm lenses
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