Cool Phone

A Samsung Blackjack II came home with me yesterday. This thing is awesome, although it does have a few shortcomings compared to my old Cingular 2125.

On the awesome side of things is a full QWERTY keyboard. It beats the heck out of predictive text on a numeric keypad. I also really like the scrollwheel/joystick. It makes navigation painless. My favorite feature though, is the built in GPS. AT&T would have happily sold me a ten buck a month turn by turn navigation package to use it. I'm a cheapskate though, and would much rather fire up the free Google Maps application and let it compute directions for me. I ran a little test this morning while I was out in the field at work. I opened Maps and set it to the satellite view. Zooming in once it was tracking more than the four birds it needs for a position, I could see that the plotted position was within a couple feet of where I was standing. Sweet!

The annoyances are few. I can't tag individual contacts with ringtones, and it won't recognize my custom mp3 ringtones. At least I haven't figured out how yet. I'm also having some synchronization issues. I saw this with the old phone too whenever I tried to synch Favorites. It gets terribly slow, and as soon as I get another good synch, I'll uncheck that option. That's always sped things up again for me. Keep your fingers crossed.