Smartphone Thoughts: From the Perspective of a Pocket PC Veteran - Samsung’s Blackjack SmartPhone Reviewed

Personal Information Management


Figure 11: The Blackjack's calendar.


Figure 12: Contacts on the Blackjack.

This is another strong area for the PDA.

The Razr offers a very basic Calendar/Datebook application, its contacts management is limited to a phone book with no postal addresses, and it provides no to-do application. These simple applications fall far short of the capabilities offered by a PDA and there’s virtually nothing available in third party apps to help here. People with serious personal information management needs should look elsewhere.

Once again, the Blackjack and N560 are pretty similar. The bundled calendar, contacts and tasks applications can store most of the same data that a desktop PIM application such as Outlook can. In views with densely packed information (such as a Month view), the N560’s larger screen is an advantage in that it can display more data more legibly. For power users, the Pocket PC offers more powerful third party applications, such as Pocket Informant and Agenda Fusion, than does the SmartPhone. These more advanced applications offer many more views and many additional and different ways to look at and manage your data.


Figure 13: A third party PIM replacement is a worthwhile addition. This image is from Agenda One by Developer One... other fine choices include Pocket Informant for SmartPhones, Papyrus and eXtreme Agenda. (Affiliate links)

On the other hand, the simpler PIM applications offered for the SmartPhone are streamlined and very easy to use. And while they don’t offer all of the features of the top Pocket PC PIM apps, they are still very powerful in their own right.

Since it offers more powerful applications, I’ll give the power users a nod and say that the N560 edges out the Blackjack in this category. The Razr is once again a distant third.

Making Calls
Obviously, this task favors the cell phone.

Since this is its raison d'être, it’s no surprise that the Razr excels at this task. The basic numeric keypad is an advantage here. Tags can be added to contacts as desired to enable voice dialing. The Razr’s Bluetooth implementation fully supports all functions of Bluetooth headsets, including voice dialing. Sound quality is excellent. The speakerphone has plenty of volume and delivers very good voice quality to the folks on the other end of the line. Overall, this phone is very good at being a phone. ;)

The Blackjack makes a fine showing here as well, but some design compromises and some puzzling design choices cause it to rank a bit lower than the Razr. The main design compromise is the need to integrate the numeric keypad within the QWERTY keyboard. As mentioned earlier, the Blackjack has taken some criticism for the layout of its numeric keys. Overall, Samsung has done a pretty good job, but a dedicated numeric keypad is still better at making phone calls. This is the tradeoff for the Blackjack’s superior text entry capabilities.

The first puzzling design choice is the fact that a phone that retails for $500 does NOT support voice dialing. I was a bit blindsided by this… voice dialing is so common these days that it never even occurred to me that such a high end phone would omit the feature. Fortunately, Microsoft’s excellent Voice Command product works very well on the Blackjack, but it sets you back $40 to provide functionality that should have been built into the phone in the first place.

The second puzzling design choice is the somewhat limited Bluetooth functionality provided for the Blackjack. While most basic functions such as receiving calls, muting, disconnecting calls, etc. through a Bluetooth headset are supported, voice dialing is again unsupported. That even applies when Microsoft Voice Command is installed… even though the software supports voice dialing through headsets, the Blackjack doesn’t.

Aside from these issues, the Blackjack matches the Razr in its phone capabilities. Sound quality is excellent here as well, both in normal use and as a speakerphone. The QWERTY keyboard makes searching through the contacts list a bit easier than the Razr with its numeric keypad. Overall, it’s a great phone that bobbles the ball on some of the details.

The N560 doesn’t compete in this category, since it’s a standard PDA without phone functionality. Pocket PCs with Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition are available for people who prefer their phone with a PDA form factor. Such devices would perform about as well as the Blackjack as a phone, and would most likely include the voice dialing and Bluetooth features that are missing in the Blackjack.