Digital Trends

At some point cell phone designers will stop screwing around with the keypad layout. To help differentiate its otherwise slammin' Blackjack (aka SGH-1607), available from Cingular for $499.99 (or $199.99 with the usual contract commitment stipulations), Samsung's industrial designers could not resist screwing with the numeric keypad. Instead of integrating the standard three-by-three plus 0 arrangement into the QWERTY layout like every other Smartphone extant, they've instead bizarrely alternated the grey number keys with black alpha keys. In other words, the 1/E key is next to the @/R button instead of the 2. What in the Sam Hill were they thinking? Different sure, but Samsung also has vastly increased the level of difficulty for this device's primary function -- making a phone call. Talk about your fatal flaws.

If you can somehow look beyond this inexplicable hiccup, you'll be rewarded with an otherwise wonderfully sleek and slim Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone that exceeds normal cell speed limits on Cingular's new 3G HSDPA/UMTS network with access to the carrier's vast array of streaming video and music services.