Digital Trends

Samsung BlackJack II (SGH-i617) March 11th, 2008 | by Damon Brown

Features and Design

Not unlike the original, the BlackJack II will fit almost entirely in an adult male’s palm, making it wider than the average phone, but still smaller than a PDA. The tasty size makes it both inviting and compact. A flat, one-piece phone, the BlackJack II has a widescreen on its upper half, and while well sized for the device, an additional inner border across the top and bottom make the actual viewing screen smaller. (To be fair, the BlackJack II screen has an excellent backlighting, which makes it easy to view in an otherwise dark room.) The navigator is the traditional circular dial surrounded by call start and call end buttons, two generic menu keys, an erase button and a very handy “home” key to take you back to the main screen. Below the dial is a full QWERTY keypad, each button wonderfully raised and defined like corn on a cob. The number buttons are in a 3 x 3 square, starting with the letter “E”. Space bar aside, there are a smattering of quick keys on the bottom row including camera, email and Internet.

The silver-and-ebony BlackJack II is smooth to touch, probably because it has very few accessories on its edges. On the right side of the phone is a microSD card slot, on the left is a closable headphone/USB jack and volume buttons, and at the very top is an on/off switch. The lens for the 2.0 MegaPixel camera is on the very back.

The Samsung BlackJack II is 3G, so it is one of the faster phones on AT&T’s network. The proprietary MEdiaNet gives fast access to news, sports and so forth. The available videos seemed to download slower than other 3G phones, and a couple videos shut down halfway through loading. While the regular menus are crisp, the Internet video resolutions were bumpy compared to other 3G phones, with a quality closer to a YouTube video than a high-res download. The internal memory may have been part of the challenge, so a microSD card should definitely be budgeted into purchase.

Image Courtesy of Samsung