Samsung Jack Windows Mobile 6

Samsung Jack AT&T Windows Mobile portfolio. This Windows Mobile 6 PDA is packed with HSDPA so you can download and browse faster than ever. Take it with you everywhere and never get lost with its built-in GPS using Telenav. Take pictures and videos. Store them on the MicroSD card or share them via email or multimedia message (MMS). Listen to music or watch videos. With its high gloss black finish, you’ll be connected to your business, frineds and family in style.

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.

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.

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.