Samsung's third Windows Mobile smartphone design for AT&T takes on the BlackBerry Curve, and it may just be our favorite of the bunch. Find out why in our Samsung Jack review.
Review summary of the Samsung Jack:
 |
|
Scoreboard » Features » Side-by-side » Gallery » |
 By keeping things simple and smoothing out the rough edges, literally and figuratively, Samsung has created another fine device for their AT&T Windows Mobile portfolio. In fact, the Samsung Jack may be our favorite device of the bunch (to check out all of Samsung's AT&T WinMo phones, click here). Its battery performance is unbeatable, and it packs all of our favorite features, including super-fast networking, Wi-Fi, GPS navigation and plenty of support for our messaging needs. We even appreciated the thoughtful extras like the turbo scroll navigation button and the ample supply of dedicated shortcut keys. Had Samsung improved the Web browsing experience a bit and tossed out the proprietary USB / headphone port, we might call this our favorite AT&T smartphone, over our current darling the Nokia E71x. Still, for serious business users, this phone is a great choice, and a worthy successor to the BlackJack name. Release: May 2009. Price: $100.
Pros: Improved, rounded design. Very light weight. Great turbo scroll button. Superlative battery life. Solid messaging and productivity options.
Cons: Web browsing still lagging. Proprietary USB port makes headphones, charging and tethering a hassle.
| Poor |
Mediocre |
74%
GOOD |
Very good |
Excellent |
|
|
|
Full Samsung Jack Review:
|
Design – Very Good
While the Samsung BlackJack II was clearly designed to compete with Motorola's then-popular Motorola Q phone, the newest incarnation of Samsung's non-touchscreen Windows Mobile smartphone, the Samsung Jack clearly takes aim at the current smartphone heavyweight, the best-selling RIM BlackBerry Curve. This is sort of ironic. The Samsung Jack gets its shortened moniker, we believe, to avoid a potential lawsuit from RIM, who zealously defend the "Black-" prefix. In retaliation, Samsung has created a phone that can go toe-to-toe with RIM's device.
The Samsung Jack is an extremely light phone. Without the thick battery, the phone almost felt hollow, it was so strikingly light. It's almost an ounce lighter than the Nokia E71x. The Jack is also a more rounded, curvy phone, with more feminine appeal than the slab-like BlackJack II or E71x devices. In fact, it's overall shape is strikingly similar to the original curve, though the keyboard and buttons are much different. The new BlackBerry Curve 8900 has a much nicer screen than the Samsung Jack, as the latter is stuck at a QVGA resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. Still, the screen looked colorful and bright, and was good for reading e-mails or acting as a camera viewfinder.
Samsung has struggled with navigation controls on their Windows Mobile phones, and we liked neither the scroll wheel on the BlackJack II nor the optical mouse button on the higher-end Samsung Epix, so we were happy to find the innovative turbo scroll button on the Samsung Jack. Press the 4-way button lightly to scroll at a normal pace, or press hard to speed through a long list. Of course, in a hurry we sometimes pressed too hard and jumped farther than we wanted, but with some self-control the turbo scroll button was very useful, and much more reliable than the former two attempts.
The Samsung Jack has a nice assortment of dedicated keys, and Samsung has clearly embraced a short press / long press philosophy. Press the Send key once to make a call, or hold it longer to activate the speakerphone. Press the Home key to return to the Today screen, or hold it longer to open the Task manager, a very useful shortcut on Windows Mobile, where open apps can pile up and slow down a device. There are loads of shortcut buttons, and many have two functions, depending on how long you hold the button down.
Calling – Very Good
Using the phone on AT&T's HSDPA network in the greater Dallas area, we were impressed with the call quality we heard on the Samsung Jack, though these Samsung smartphones have always made calls that sounded good. The phone showed only 3 out of 5 bars of signal strength, but calls never dipped or dropped out unexpectedly. Battery life was very impressive. Most of the device's weight comes in the whopping 1480 mAh battery, which gave us almost 8 hours of talking time in our tests. This is very competitive, especially against the BlackBerry Curve, which gave us similar results even though it surfs a slower, less power-hungry EDGE network.
For calling features, Windows Mobile 6.1 is one of the best smartphone platforms for contact handling and keeping track of calls. You can start searching your contact list from the Today screen by simply typing a name. Once you've made a call, the phone attaches the call log information to the corresponding contact. The Samsung Jack also includes all our favorite calling features, including speaker-independent voice dialing, easy conference calling and an adequate speakerphone. We wish there was a dedicated button for voice dialing, a feature that is nice to have while driving, but instead there are dedicated keys for the speakerphone and volume muting.
Messaging and Keyboard – Very Good
The Samsung Jack has a nice assortment of messaging options, pretty much everything we expect on a solid business smartphone today. No surprises, no social networking apps built in, but with Outlook and AT&T's Xpress Mail, all our usual messaging bases were covered. The phone kept giving us strange out of memory error messages with our Microsoft Exchange account, but this wasn't really a problem, as all our e-mails, contacts and calendar items still came through just fine. By default, Xpress Mail set up our Gmail account for POP access, but there are options to define your own POP or IMAP service. The instant messaging client was the same basic, aging support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo that we've seen before, but it still did a nice job signing us into all three services at once. Finally, for simple text messaging fans, Windows Mobile 6.1 uses threaded messaging, so you can browse through all of the messages in a conversation together. When our texting conversation started to get long, that turbo scroll helped us skim through it quickly.
The keyboard on the Samsung Jack wasn't our favorite, but it wasn't bad. The keys are a bit small, but they are raised just enough and curved slightly toward the center to give them definition. Typing on the Jack was fine. We made mistakes, but could see ourselves getting used to the keys with some practice. We prefer discrete keys that don't butt up against each other.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
For business users, Windows Mobile 6.1 again proves itself one of the most capable smartphone platforms on the market for scheduling. The calendar app is fairly ugly, but it certainly gets the job done. Plus, it has all of our favorite features from Outlook, including the ability to invite attendees to meetings from the phone. For productivity, the Samsung Jack gets the standard, non-touchscreen version of Office Mobile. You can't create a new document, but you can view and edit Word, Excel and basic PowerPoint presentations on the phone. Plus, Samsung has included a nice assortment of smaller PIM apps, including a D-Day countdown clock, a Wikipedia search tool and more.
The star of the show is Internet Sharing, our favorite app for using a phone as a tethered modem. Internet Sharing provides a seamless, easy experience to connect a Windows laptop to the Internet using the phone's cellular connection, and we had a great experience with the Samsung Jack. The phone tethered with no trouble, and download speeds were fantastic. We regularly saw downloads exceed 2,000Kbps, sometimes reaching as high as 2.3Mbps. This is at the very high end of what we expect from AT&T's 3G HSDPA network. Our biggest complaint is that the Jack uses a proprietary USB cable, so if you forget to bring it on the road, it will be hard to replace. We always prefer microUSB or something more standard to tether and charge the phone with our laptop.
Multimedia – Good
The multimedia experience was pretty good with the Samsung Jack, and AT&T has included a few additional options to improve the standard Windows Media Player sync experience. A trial version of mSpot's music sync is included, with a full version available for a small fee. The app will read your iTunes music library and help synchronize music from libraries beyond the standard Windows Media Player playlists. We also appreciate the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone adapter to fit Samsung's proprietary slot, though we'd always prefer to have a standard 3.5mm port on the phone itself, since we tend to lose tiny dongles.
The phone also has access to all of AT&T's multimedia services, including the Cellular Video service. Streaming videos looked okay, and the selection is certainly improving, but these streaming services will never take the place of real mobile TV, either in terms of playback quality or video selection. For music streaming, the Samsung Jack can draw a small selection of channels from XM satellite radio. Nothing too exciting, but with the fast network connection, streaming music was quite listenable.
Camera – Good
In the past, we've come down hard on Samsung for poor image quality on their cameraphones, but it seems like they've been improving image quality recently. Pictures we took with the Samsung Jack's 3.2-megapixel shooter weren't bad. Of course, we were shooting in bright sunlight and late-day sunset lighting, ideal conditions both, but under these circumstances we saw pretty good results from the camera. We'd like to see auto focus, which might help preserve more detail, and which would also help the camera focus on the correct spot, as it sometimes found the background instead of our foreground subject. Check out our sample images below for our favorites from our test period.
Wildflowers
Wildflowers, Sunset White Balance
Self Portrait
Rusted Lock on Wood
Web browsing – Mediocre
While Windows Mobile excels at business and productivity apps, it seriously lags behind the competition in terms of Web browsing. The aging version of Internet Explorer we found on the Samsung Jack has already been replaced, and a few rare new WinMo smartphones, like the Palm Treo Pro, are already shipping with a slightly improved version of IE6 built for mobile devices. On the Jack, Internet Explorer could barely handle full-HTML pages. All the parts came through, but formed a sort of Frankenstein hodge-podge that jumbled the layout of our favorite pages, especially our own homepage. We would prefer if Samsung and AT&T would bundle a more proficient browser, like one of Opera Mobile's offerings. Still, the Samsung Jack impressed us again with that ever-useful turbo scroll wheel, and when we did load up a long Web site, we were able to navigate the page quickly and smoothly.
Network speeds were never a problem with the Samsung Jack. As we mentioned earlier, the Jack is capable of some truly impressive download speeds, and this played out nicely in the Web browser as well. Pages may not look great, but they sure loaded quickly. When we wanted to kick things up a notch, we enabled the built-in Wi-Fi, and the phone did a fine job attaching to our home network.
GPS navigation – Very Good
The Samsung BlackJack II gave us some trouble with dodgy GPS performance, but we had no such trouble with the Samsung Jack. The GPS sensor on the phone found us quickly and held our position as we navigated around the North Dallas suburbs. The phone uses AT&T Navigator for turn-by-turn directions. It isn't the prettiest or most advanced navigation option, and it certainly won't compete with a dedicated portable navigation device, but it got the job done. The app had trouble holding onto our login information, it requires a monthly subscription with a login, but this was only a minor hassle, and we have no complaints about its performance otherwise.
Price and availability
The Samsung Jack is available now from AT&T for $100 with a contract agreement.
|
|
|
|
|
Archive