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

The Comparison
Now let’s take a look at some common uses of mobile devices to see how these units compare. My ground rules for the comparison are to pit the Blackjack against the two devices that it’s designed to replace… a “standard” cell phone and a “standard” PDA. So while the criticisms of the Pocket PC when evaluating cell phone tasks could be mitigated by using a Pocket PC phone, that device is not a “standard” Pocket PC… it’s another convergence device. So to fans of Pocket PC phones, please don’t give me feedback that the Pocket PC form factor would have done better had I compared to a Pocket PC phone… that would be a completely different comparison and out of the scope of this article.

Text Entry
This task is typically a strong point for PDAs.

With its numeric keypad, the Razr is out of its element here. Multiple keypress entry and predictive text may be adequate for text messaging, but is far too slow and cumbersome for any extensive text entry.

The Blackjack and N560 are both very capable for text entry. The Blackjack provides its QWERTY keyboard, an entry method at which most people can become quite adept. The N560, with its touch screen, offers the most options for text entry, including letter recognition, character recognition and a wide variety of onscreen keyboards, including QWERTY keyboards and specialized designs such as Fitaly.

I would call the Blackjack and N560 pretty much even in this task… it’s more a matter of preference. The Razr is a distant third in this task.

Menu Navigation and Launching Applications


Figure 9: The Home screen... the SmartPhone equivalent of the Today screen on the Pocket PC.


Figure 10: The Start menu on the Blackjack.

In general, this task doesn’t favor either the cell phone or the PDA.

Again, the Blackjack and N560 are similar. Both use a Start button, but the N560 offers a dropdown Start menu, while the Blackjack goes to an icon based screen. Windows Mobile 5 for Pocket PCs inherited the soft key concept from earlier versions of the SmartPhone Editions, but the Pocket PC soft keys are touch screen based, while the SmartPhones have dedicated hardware buttons. When dropdown or popup menus appear, the N560 offers the advantage of making selections with the stylus or scrolling to your selection, while the Blackjack is limited to the scrolling approach. All SmartPhone menus offer selection via number as well, so that’s an advantage in the Blackjack’s favor.

Although the Razr is not a Windows SmartPhone and uses a different operating system, it works much like the Blackjack for this task. While the devices have different approaches to this task, they all do well enough to make this one a 3 way tie.