Blackjack II: First Glance Review

Well, I decided the abhorrent battery life of my Samsung D357 and volume issues (earpiece is unusually quiet) combined with the fact that I’ve had this phone for 2 years and now eligible for an upgrade meant it was time to upgrade. My father-in-law bought me a new battery for the D357 for Christmas in 2006 and after a year and it only lasts a day or two, and right now I make less than 3 hours worth of calls per month.

So I went shopping, and found the hot-off-the-presses Samsung Blackjack II a capable little unit. With AT&T’s online discount of $150 plus a $100 mail-in rebate (going out today, I’m no rebate slouch!), the total price tag was $149 plus taxes (tax on pre-rebate cost of $249, of course). I was initially surprised at the weight of the unit — it’s much lighter than the Treo700w that I carried around from my time working at LACOE.

Using the purely scientific weight measuring scale of picking up both phones in each hand and seeing which felt heavier then switching which phone was in each hand and checking again, I’d say the BJ2 is about the same weight as my D357.

Being a good little boy scout, I let the battery fully charge, which only took about 2 hours, before activating the phone. During the charging time, I installed the ActiveSync software on my XP partition (I’m in Windows a lot lately doing Flash programming for FOX) and skipped loading the applications that use the tethered phone as a modem device for Internet usage. By the time I was ready to use the phone it was past 9pm so I was unable to get AT&T to add the PDA data plan to my account — something I couldn’t do online at AT&T’s web site on my own.

Given the CPU inside the unit combined with running Windows Mobile 6, my BJ2 is ready to go in about 38 seconds from power-on. 14 seconds of that is the WM6 boot screen, the remainder is a 3G animation from AT&T for a few seconds and the rest of the time just sitting at a bit AT&T logo before the WM6 “today screen” is ready for use. 38 seconds seems a little long, but considering that my D357 took 32 seconds to boot including address book initialization, an extra 6 seconds is no bid deal.

After hacking the registry so the AT&T animation doesn’t play, the boot time is still about 38 seconds, just that I’m staring at the WM6 startup screen the whole time instead of the AT&T animation. The default “Today Screen” includes 6 icons along the top: Contacts, Calendar, Messaging, and the last 3 applications you used, then a basic clock/date, a link for Xpress Mail, 3 icons for AOL/MSN/Yahoo IM, and a missed call counter, and appointment list, selected phone profile, and a count of messages/Emails.

From a user interface point of view, the scrolling wheel on the front is very simple to use, and while the wheel itself feels a little fragile it’s pretty robust so far, though I need to figure out how to speed up the wheel scrolling – right now I have to spin the wheel a full quarter turn to scroll to the next item on whatever I’m viewing.

Since my only other recent smartphone was the Treo700w I’d say the keyboard size seems comparable — I left LACOE many months ago so don’t have the Treo to do a true side-by-side. However having been a typist for 20+ years, I find the keys on the phone a little small but still usable. At the bottom of the keyboard there are some custom keys which I’ve read are not re-programmable.

1. There’s a button with the AT&T logo on it that opens IE to AT&T’s MEdiaNet home page which looks like a cheesy WAP-based site. WAP?! Hey, AT&T, 2002 called, they want their technology back. (WAP v2.0 spec was released in late 2002, seriously it’s nearly 2008!)
2. The button with ‘CV’ printed inside a monitor icon loads up the Cingular Video site in IE which I haven’t played with at all.
3. The “silent” button does what you’d expect — silences the phone — if you hold it for 3 seconds, and un-silences the phone and plays a chime if you hold it for another 3 seconds.
4. There’s a button with a camera icon which activates the 2MP camera which takes decent enough photos (like the packaging the phone came in), but like every other camera phone I’ve used the picture is *very* shaky so the potential to take blurry photos is enormous. Also, as can be seen in the larger version of the packaging the top and bottom edges of the box are significantly bowed, indicating a fish-eye/wide-angle style lens, which given the total diameter of maybe 1/8″ of the lens on the back of the camera makes enough sense … just don’t expect to take any award-winning shots with this phone.
5. The last custom button is an icon of en envelope which of course loads the Messaging application. More on this later.

Since the phone comes with a micro-SD slot, I put my 2GB storage card in the phone and immediately thought I did something wrong since the memory card doesn’t seem to have any sort of eject function — I had to use the end of a paperclip to pry the edge of the card out enough to grip it with my fingers to remove it. Formatting the card as FAT32 on XP worked fine in the BJ2, and I’ve loaded it up with a few MP3 files (TobyMac) to test the audio. I was surprised there was no way to format the SD card on the phone itself.

As far as messaging goes, sending messages to/from the phone is pretty painless so far. I set up my Hotmail account as the primary incoming Email account for the phone, which can access mail for up to 3 Email accounts, so I’ll use my w98.us and iandouglas.com accounts too, likely. Unfortunately trying to sign into mobile.live.com with my Hotmail credentials producted an error saying “the service you are trying to reach is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”… however I clicked the link to go to mobile.live.com directly and away it went /shrug

For IM, I added my secondary AIM account which downloaded my buddy list just fine and logged me in. I debated trying my ICQ number since sending ICQ credentials to the ‘oscar’ login server for AIM will generally work too. Of course I’m curious whether Pidgin has a Windows Mobile version of their app since I like to log my IM conversations etc.

I haven’t played with the “Xpress Mail” yet because I haven’t seen yet whether it connects to the Email server via an IMAP connection and simply pushes a copy of each message to the phone as opposed to a POP3-style download-and-delete operation, since I’m a bit of an Email packrat. I’ll have to see if there are any decent mobile Email clients.

I checked out the GPS driver briefly before writing this review and happy to say that downloading the GoogleMaps application found my position within about a quarter mail, and considering I’m bunkered down in my office right now, that was pretty decent. I’ll go for a drive at lunch and see if I have any better luck. I was happy to see a handful of decent looking GPS map/tracking applications to try out. I played with the built-in TeleNav software which gives turn-by-turn instructions if you enter a starting address and destination, but it won’t use the GPS module unless you pay AT&T an additional $9.99/month surcharge.

Of course I was curious about the audio quality, so fired up the embedded “media player” and added the TobyMac MP3 files from the MicroSD card. It played the MP3 files just fine, though I’m sure the built-in media player won’t play .ogg or .flac so I’ll have to see if anyone’s built a WM6 application for those formats yet. Wonder if anyone’s ported WinAmp to WM6 yet? Anyhow, the music sounds fine enough, though the speaker is a far cry from the Altec subwoofer system I use here at home. I imagine if I were to buy the proprietary-plug headphones, the sound quality would be a little better. The adapter for plugging in your own headphones cost me $14.99.

I was happy to see that the new 3G SIM that came with the BJ2 is listed at the OpenMoko wiki as being one of the few AT&T SIM cards that will work in the Neo1973 so whenever Michael at OpenMoko returns my phone from doing a modem firmware upgrade to hopefully let me use my pre-paid TMobile SIM, I’ll definitely try the AT&T SIM in the Neo since I’ve heard great things about the GPS, etc., and after experiencing enough Windows application nightmares in the past few weeks with work, I want to get back into writing my own “open” software. Proprietary systems suck. ‘Nuff said.

Some of my favorite programs so far: like Google Maps, GPS Test, Yahoo Go 2.0 (v3 beta which was announced at CES isn’t available for the BJ2 yet, but more on Yahoo Go in a second), Opera (I bought a license, PLEASE support their efforts and buy a license it’s only $24-$29), Cellfire, Fizz Weather (free download from Handango’s Free App Friday where they gave away one application for free; sadly they discontinued this program on January 1st 2008), i-nigma — by far the idiot-proof way to install applications for your camera-capable smartphone, OggSync, Live Search, Plaxo, and Resco System Toys. For these apps, here’s a basic review and a download link that was accurate as of the time of this writing. If you find a broken link, please report it to me and I’ll fix it ASAP.