At Microsoft's booth at CTIA, we get our hands on the fully Ballmer'ed new Samsung BlackJack II. Was it everything we anticipated?
Click here to read our review of the Samsung BlackJack II
The new Samsung BlackJack II will easily be mistaken for the original BlackJack. It looks like an update, but retains many of the same styling cues and angles of the original smartphone. The most significant difference on the phone is the new click wheel navigation pad. The pad actually spins, which seems strange, considering Samsung's affinity for touch sensitive buttons, and the fact that scroll wheels are one input method for which touch sensitivity has actually worked. In any case, we gave the wheel a spin, and it felt nice and smooth.
Unfortunately, it didn't have a great effect on the interface. Much like the jog wheel that used to grace the BlackJack, the scroll wheel moves up and down through the menus, but Windows Mobile just isn't an OS designed for scrolling. Multiple columns weren't linked smoothly. Perhaps an overlay is called for, something like the effort Motorola went to on their Verizon Wireless implementation of the Q9m.
And, while we talking about the updated Q, let's have our first inevitable comparison between the two devices. Both the new Q9 and the new BlackJack II are underwhelming updates. These are definitely evolutionary steps, streamlining the form factor, while leaving the feature sets mostly in line with what we've seen before, with few surprises.
Samsung has surprised us recently. During our trip to Korea, Samsung showed us the SGH-i550, which uses the Symbian smartphone OS, but also features a trackball as well as GPS for navigation. The scroll wheel might be an interesting new idea to improve upon the jog wheel, but it doesn't offer the real 2-D navigation that a trackball can provide.
The keyboard seems a bit nicer than the original BlackJack, though not much different. Thankfully, Samsung has rearranged the number keys, and taken out the strange spacer key in between each, a design choice on the older phone we couldn't get into. We're also interested to see more business phones support AT&T's Video Share service, but we're still a bit jaded from our Korea trip, where similar versions of this phone had full video-conferencing capabilities, and not just AT&T's one-way service.
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