Table of Contents

Introduction/First Impressions
Design
Screen
Control
Other Points on Design

Features
Telephony
Speed
Conectivity
Telstra TBiz on the i601
Other OS Applications
Camera & Video
Battery
Security

Conclusions
Pros & Cons
Manufacturer's Specifications

1. Introduction & First Impressions

The Samsung Blackjack is a sleek and highly compact Windows Mobile 5.0 driven HSPDA capable smartphone, in small block form. It offers a full QWERTY keyboard layout, with separate angled oval buttons for each key. This is complemented by a very nice QVGA 320 x 240 display that measures 5.8 centimetres (or 2.3 inches).

Historically, Samsung Australia released the i320 model in 2006, which is somewhat similar to the Blackjack, but it is GSM only and lacks 3G support. Following in the footsteps of the i320, the Blackjack was released in the USA in Q4 of 2006, exclusive to the carrier Cingular, and came solely in the model designation SGH-i607.

i600 has Wi-Fi and Video Call

One version of the Blackjack is Wi-Fi capable, and the other is not. The Wi-Fi capable unit is capable of video calls and has a front camera mounted near the screen: the other does not, and completely bars any video calls it receives.

The US/Cingular i607 model lacks Wi-Fi capability. Interestingly, this absence of Wi-Fi feature is shared with the Telstra delivered Blackjack. We have a Telstra review unit here, and interestingly it came in an i607 Cingular box. The box labels it as an i607, and the picture corresponds exactly to the unit: but take a peek under the battery and the unit itself is actually designated as an i601. The mystery deepens.

The other unit that we have here, sourced from overseas, is an i600. It has Wi-Fi and a front camera and is designated as an i600. We are told that the Optus and Vodafone Blackjacks are going to be Wi-Fi... Aha! So whatever you will find underneath their battery, these carriers Blackjack models are likely to be equivalent to what Samsung has termed the i600, and equipped with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. If the planets are aligned properly at their debut, they might even be i600s.

To some this will represent a serious omission on Telstra’s part. However, Telstra makes up for the ‘No-Fi’ situation by offering an array of Next-G applications including Foxtel, BigPond Music, Yellow Search, and Whereis Maps. So we will talk about these compensations a little further below.
 

2. Design

Lay your hands on the Blackjack and savour the experience: it has excellent build quality. Its dimensions are 113 x 59 x 15mm, but not really. Why? Most of the phone is actually only 11.8mm thick. The small section on the upper part of the rear of the phone that has a surface area of roughly 27 x 37 mm is the only section of the phone that is 15mm—and this is hardly obtrusive in the design. The unit’s weight is a little over 100g. Despite light weight, the whole device is well built and feels very sturdy. The soft-touch matt black finish makes the device good to grip.

left: extension battery ; right: standard battery

The Blackjack's screen is sharp and clear

The 2.3” Landscape, 320 x 240 pixel resolution, 64k colour TFT screen is very sharp and bright, and has a much better viewing angle than many previous Windows Mobile smartphones. The sharpness could be put down to a higher dot pitch than many smartphones, as 320x240 is quite a few pixels to be wedged into the compact screen. Strangely, the i601 unit that we have here renders colours more brightly and intensely than the i600, with the i600 being a softer, warmer display--something like fluorescent Vs incandescent. It can’t be explained through physical screen age, but perhaps by phone release date—for the i600 was acquired months before the Australian release, and maybe Samsung has changed the backlight within this period. If you didn't have the two different units side-by-side, you probably wouldn't notice it.

Some users have complained about dust penetrating under the screen, so it is visible but impossible to clean without dismantling the phone. Neither of the units we have here at Which Smartphone? encountered this problem (and one has been with us for long enough to find out). This may well have been something that Samsung has already addressed.

Control

The Blackjack has a side wheel with a back key (à la Blackberry) for easy, one handed navigation. Many of the phone functions can be performed by just using this thumbwheel, located at the right side of the device. The thumbwheel moves upwards, downwards and then can be pressed down for confirmation/OK. There is also a ‘back’ key positioned underneath the thumbwheel function. This control is very handy for tasks such as reading emails, news, .pdfs/mobile books, and internet browsing. Nevertheless if scrolling horizontally is involved then the circular four-way direction key below the screen will need to be used instead.

One thing about the thumbwheel is that it can only scroll as fast as your finger can go back and forth. On some occasions when you need to cover pages of information it can get tedious to operate with the thumbwheel.

Holding down the thumbwheel for 2 seconds or so brings up a (customizable) quick launch menu which is very handy and speeds phone operation.

Blackjack's QWERTY

The QWERTY keypad with the assistance of T9 predictive text makes typing email a lot faster than any other input methods (i.e., touch screen or numbers pad).

The left and right softkeys placement is too tightly placed to other keys and hard to spot without looking at it. From time to time I would press the call or hang up keys by accident, despite thinking that I had navigated the learning curve to get used to the phone.

There is another interesting difference between the Telstra i601 and the i600 units we have, and that is the shape of the circular four way direction key. The i600 is quite prominent and easier to access without hitting surrounding buttons: the i601 is much more recessed, and this makes hitting the send and end keys more likely.

Other Points about Design

The back cover of the i600 is nearly impossible to open with the human hand. On the few occasions when I needed to access to the SIM card/battery, it was like pulling a large tree out of the ground (except that there’s a decent area to grip a tree trunk). Reports on the web show that many other users have similar complaints. I followed the tip per the user’s manual, but I just couldn’t open it. I forced so hard that I felt that I was close to breaking the handset, and yet it still would not oblige. In the end, I managed to open it by using a suction cup to lift the lid open a bit, quickly sticking all fingernails that were available into the slit and then pulling the cover down. The first time I got the cover off, I carefully examined the closing mechanism. I oiled the part that would hold the cover to the phone, hoping that it would be easier to open without any tool. I was wrong. The second attempt to remove the cover was as hard as the first attempt. So now a humble suction cup has had its status formally raised to ‘official SGH i600 back cover opener’. Here’s another advantage of the Telstra i601 unit: you don’t have to be an omnipotent deity in order to open the unit with your hands. That could well be one more of those ongoing tweaks at the Samsung production line.

3. Features

Telephony

The Blackjack i601 (Telstra) is a quad band unit, so you can use it globally (like the US's i607). The i600 is tri band GSM 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz. (Both are HSPDA.)  In either unit, the voice quality is great and substantially better than many other smartphones, for both sending and receiving (my previous O₂ Atom is a handy scapegoat to use as a case-in-point). The speaker phone is not as powerful on the i600 unit as it is on the i601. Having said that, the i600 unit is still reasonably good. Three way and Conference calling is supported. The contact address book is unlimited in capacity (or limited only by the unit’s memory) and can hold lots of information: there are fifty-five fields of information to fill in. Yes, 55, count them. There should be a warning sticker on the box for obsessive-compulsives, perhaps something like “filling in all the contact information may put you in rehab”. For those so debilitated, the Symbian system of fields being created as you need them (aside from a few obvious major ones, about 11 of them, with around 35 optionals) is more likely to maintain your sanity. Pictures and ring tones (inc. mp3) are independently assignable to each contact.

Speed

The TI OMAP1710 dual core CPU running at 220MHz provides decent performance. With an MP3 being played in the background, the device became less responsive, and yet it was still able to use other non-processor intensive applications without too much constraint. The Windows Mobile OS is perhaps the limiting factor here. The unit has 64 Mb internal and 128 Mb ROM memory.

Connectivity

The Blackjack has Wi-Fi (i600 only), Bluetooth 2.0 and HSDPA capability, but no infrared. The latter is a bit of a legacy item, and this was obviously Samsung’s thought in its decision to not include it.

If your network features it, the HSPDA network can offer up to 1.8 Mbps (or six to seven times the speed of the 3G network), and this is the first Samsung phone capable of downloading at this speed. When browsing, content on web pages appear very promptly with HSDPA. When multimedia streaming, there is little time taken to fill up the buffer, and few digital delays experienced in a good signal area. HSDPA also opens up a new efficient way of communication using VoIP, that doesn’t depend on wireless LANs. As carriers move towards models such as evidenced in Three’s new X Series, this becomes a very viable (and cost saving) alternative way of making calls.

Wi-Fi (on the i600) is quick to configure, and it detects surrounding networks in a matter of few seconds. The data speed is expectedly fast on an 802.11g network. Pairing Bluetooth devices is also a breeze. We found that Bluetooth headsets and GPS receivers connected and reconnected to the Blackjack without any hitches. Stereo bluetooth headsets are supported. This is just as well considering that the unit doesn’t come with a set of stereo headphones.

The Blackjack has an internal micro-SD / Transflash expansion slot. Two gigabyte cards are supported.

A single proprietary connector exists as a three function port for USB data exchange, headphone and power. The USB connection is at 1.2 standard with data transfer throttled at 400K per second.  Hence, it takes forever to transfer gigabyte sized files. A computer to memory card adaptor with USB 2.0 standard is probably mandatory to transfer MP3, PDF books and multimedia. The low USB transfer rate is quite inconvenient for those swapping large files in and out of the Blackjack frequently. The criticism of some Nokia products that only supply a pop port rather than standard headphone jack also holds true for the Blackjack.

Telstra Tbiz on i601

Follow the little Tbiz icon that is positioned directly on the i601’s standby screen, and be catapulted into a world of Telstra services: Yellow Pages Search, Web Mail (Bigpond, Ninemsn & Yahoo), Business News, Big Pond (launchpad for a massive array of news and entertainment, web services and phone addons), Finance News, Weather, Sensis Search, Whereis maps and directions, and a very handy Travel section that can get you, for example, straight to Qantas schedules, or reports on different fuel prices in your area. Foxtel is also available, which of course includes numerous news, sports and entertainment channels. There is another link for gaining access to frequently updated account information.

no streamed video stretch, just shrink

Other OS Applications

Unlike smartphones such as many of the E series Nokias, The Blackjack views but does not edit office documents out-of-the-box. This is a drawback of the smartphone edition of Windows Mobile OS, as Microsoft does choose to include it in the Pocket PC OS. Other apps include contacts, to-do lists, notes, a calendar, voice recording, timers, imperial-metric conversion program and a world clock.

Importantly, push email is supported by the Blackjack, as well as instant messaging and POP and IMAP mail accounts. Of course, the usual MMS/SMS capability is included. Integration with Exchange 2003 (SP2) is possible without an enterprise server.

Camera / Video

With the ever-increasing specifications for cameras on phones, the Blackjack’s camera is a relatively modest 1.3 Megapixels. It doesn’t particularly shine, but is nevertheless sufficient for quick shots, caller ID pics and so on. Personally, I am not a mobile phone camera person so the camera is good enough for me. Holding down the back button for a couple of seconds is a shortcut access to the camera function. There is a 2x digital zoom feature, multiple resolution selection, white balance and effect settings and a self timer. For some reason, the Blackjack loses the LED flash feature that accompanies the i320N. Colours are rendered well by the camera.

Taking video is also supported, at 320x240 and 176x144 pixels resolution. There are three quality settings to choose from and an option to switch off the sound. A full sixty minutes of video can be recorded.

 
Battery

the extended battery back cover

A typical scenario for testing saw a fully charged battery in the morning put through these activities;

• some browsing action via HSDPA;
• downloading a few RSS feeds;
• listening to a few MP3 songs;
• Wi-Fi turned on, used for VoIP @ 20 mins
• a dozen emails sent/received
• standard carrier calls for about 25 minutes

—will surely get the battery flat by the evening. To overcome the battery’s short puff, Samsung provides 2 of them in the i600 package (OS market). In Australia, the Telstra package comes with a larger second battery (2100mAh) that increases the handset dimensions from 11.8mm to 15mm thick (see discussion & pictures above in phone design aspects). The extended battery theoretically prolongs the usage to 2.5 times the standard one.

Security aspects of the phone

Security on the Blackjack is pretty standard, being a phone lock and auto phone lock, call barring passwords and SIM pin controls.

Conclusion / Summary

Standby Screen with Custom Theme

Perhaps the upgrade to ROM with the recently launched WM6 may spice up the OS somewhat, as that is probably the weakest point of an otherwise excellent phone. (For the SGH-i60x series, WM6 will be released for testing on 19th May 2007 and free for download after testing is completed.) It is already being offered to US Cingular Blackjack i607 owners. Voice activated calling will be one benefit of the new OS, but Mobile Office with editing capability will not be included.

Irrespective of which model you have, the Blackjack is a great package. It is to date one of the best showcasings of the Windows Mobile Operating System (5.0 for Smartphones) available. It is compact, well built, good looking, a good form factor, a fast downloader and generally good to operate. Samsung have managed to package the state-of-the-art into one of the most compact smartphones ever, and they will undoubtedly be very successful with this phone.

Manufacturer's Technical Specifications i601 / i607

Announced in Australia: March 2007

• i607N USA Radiation (SAR) measurement: FCC ID A3LSCHI600

• SAR rating W/kg) digital    1.43
• SAR rating W/kg) analog    0.97
  
  

Other Specifications;

Manufacturer's Technical Specifications i600

• Class: smartphone, 3G

• Individual button QWERTY-keypad.

• 3G UMTS networks

• HSDPA services

• Wi-Fi

• Bluetooth module.

• General features

  • eGSM 900/1800/1900, UMTS 2100/HSDPA

  • Battery type Li-Ion

  • Manufacturer's specification of battery life:

    talk time: up to 330 mins

    standby time:  

  • 2,3" TFT QVGA (240x320 pixels) resolution 65000 colours

  • Operating system: Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone

  • Colour: black

  • Weight: 105g 

  • Dimensions: 113 x 59 x 11.8 mm

• Memory

  • Phonebook - several numbers for a name, also you can assign an image, photo and melody, even MP3

  • Unlimited number of user groups, assign a name to several groups at once

  • Call lists, no limit on the number of entries, not only time and date of the call are specified but the type as well. You can set storage period for call entries (a month by default)

  • 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of Flash-memory

  • Connector for microSD

• Call management, ringing tones

  • Vibration Call Alert

  • Polyphonic call melodies, 64-tones

  • Fast dial

  • Automatic redial

  • Speakerphone

• SMS

  • Т9 predictive text input

  • Concatenated messages

  • Message templates

  • Send and receive graphical messages

• Camera

  • Integrated 1.3 MP camera resolution 1280x1024 pixels

  • Video recording capability, MPEG4/Н.263

  • Digital zoom

  • Effects

  • Frontal VGA-camera for videocalls

• Multimedia

  • mp3/aac files as call tones

  • Integrated video and audio player (MPEG4, H.263, МР3, ААC, ААC+, е-ААC)

  • up to 60 minutes of video recording
    

  • Java (MIDP 2.0)

• Connectivity

  • Integrated mail client (SMTP/POP3/IMAP4)

  • GPRS class 10

  • EDGE Class 10

  • WAP 2.0/xHTML

  • Wi-Fi (802.11b/g)

  • Bluetooth

  • MMS

  • Push e-mail

  • SyncML

  • Synchronization with PC (USB, Bluetooth)

• Organizer and extras

  • A complete set of standard applications for Windows Mobile

  • Pixel Viewer (programs for viewing files MS Word, Exel, PDF)

  • Dictaphone

  • Date, time, world time

  • Alarm clock, reminders

  • Timer, stopwatch, calculator