Samsung’s Jack SGH-i637 is the latest in the company’s diverse lineup of Microsoft OS-powered smartphones. This follow-up to the highly successful BlackJack II hews closely to the usual formula—a slab QWERTY handset without a touch screen—but adds a number of useful updates that make this the best BlackJack yet. It’s also one of the top Windows Mobile smartphones recently—and it comes at a bargain price even if it doesn’t quite live up to the lofty standards of comparable RIM, Apple, and Nokia smart devices on AT&T.
Samsung Jack's keyboard pretty easy to use.
By now, you’ve probably seen the TV commercials featuring Ozzy Osbourne and his new personal assistant, the Samsung Jack. The Jack is the successor to the Samsung BlackJack series and aside from the name change, the Windows Mobile smartphone brings an updated look and some feature enhancements, including a faster processor and better camera. The Jack also includes the staple productivity apps and e-mail capabilities to satisfy the needs of the busy individual and delivered excellent phone quality during our tests. All of this is made even more attractive by the Samsung Jack’s $99.99 price tag (with a two-year contract). However, when compared with AT&T’s other messaging smartphone, the Nokia E71x, we have to say we slightly favored the E71x over the Samsung Jack for its design. The Jack’s keyboard and overall feel was a bit too slick for our liking and Samsung’s use of proprietary ports is annoying. They’re minor issues but something to consider. The Samsung Jack is available now from AT&T.
The Samsung Jack looks a lot like the BlackBerry Bold or the BlackBerry Curve 8900 with its metallic charcoal-gray paint and thick, tinted chrome band around the edges, even if its plastic is a little too slippery and shiny and the Samsung Jack is a bit of a departure from the Samsung BlackJack and BlackJack II. While it keeps the slim QWERTY candy bar form factor (4.4 inches tall by 2.4 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick and weighs 3.5 ounces), the smartphone features tapered edges and rounder corners to give it an overall look that’s more reminiscent of the BlackBerry Curve 8300 series. It also borrows the mirrored chrome look of the Samsung Propel Pro to give the smartphone an updated, flashier look, but not so flashy that it would look inappropriate in a boardroom. Weighs 3.6 ounces, that’s a good half an ounce lighter than the average BlackBerry Curve or original Motorola Q. We parked a Samsung Epix, the Jack’s touch-screen-enabled older brother, nearby; the Epix looks gargantuan in comparison. The Jack’s roomy QWERTY keyboard includes four rows of some of the best keys we’ve tried recently: They’re surprisingly large and roomy, given the size of the handset, with just the right amount of click and resistance.
The LCD is a basic 2.4-inch, 320-by-240-pixel QVGA affair. There’s no touch capability, which in the Microsoft world means that this phone runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard, not Professional. The five-way control pad, meanwhile, is touch-sensitive: Push lightly to scroll through text on a Web page, or push harder to jump between pages. There are plenty of shortcut keys around the control pad and along the bottom row of the QWERTY keyboard, but the slightly crowded look worked fine in practice. The sides contain power and volume controls, along with a covered proprietary headphone and charger port.
TFT screen that shows 65,000 colors at a 320×240-pixel resolution. It’s bright and clear, though it’s now starting to look a bit inferior compared to some of the latest messaging smartphones with higher-resolution displays, such as the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900. As usual, you can customize the Home screen with various background images, themes, and so forth.
Unlike the Samsung Epix, the Jack does not have a touch screen, so the controls below the display will help you navigate the phone. You get two soft keys, a Home shortcut, a back button, Talk and End keys, and a four-way directional keypad with a center select key. With a long press, the Talk and End buttons will also activate the speakerphone and lock the handset. In addition, Samsung added a feature called Turbo Scroll that lets you quickly scroll through an entire page by pressing down on the navigation buttons, while a light press will simply scroll through the text. It’s not a revolutionary feature by any means but does come in handy. We had no complaints about the layout or size of the controls and found them quite easy to use.
Overall, we were quite pleased with the Samsung Jack’s full QWERTY keyboard as well, though there was a slight problem, which we’ll get to in a bit. The Jack ditches the oval-like buttons of its predecessors and goes the way of Propel Pro with rectangular keys. Though there’s not a lot of spacing between them, the buttons are a good size and they’re not as stiff to press as the BlackJack II’s, so we didn’t have many mispresses. The only trouble we ran into is that the A button on our review unit seems to be off. Looking at the phone from a profile, we can see that the A key sits a little below the rest and so it requires a really firm press to register the letter and whenever we press the S button, it types an A before the S. We had a feeling we just got a defective phone and had Samsung send us another review unit, and the A key worked just fine on the new one. Next