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I’m going to preface my review of the AT&T Jack with the following caveat: you will see reflections in many of the pictures.  There, I said it…I feel better now.   The Jack, aka Samsung i637, could be seen as the younger sibling of the Blackjack II, but with smoother lines and similar footprint, though IMHO bearing closer resemblance to the Motorola Q9 series.  It sports tri-band UMTS/HSDPA and quad-band GSM capabilities, 256 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM, a 528 MHz processor and a 320×240 QVGA screen.

Box contents:

A “lightweight” contender?

The first thing that grabbed my attention about the handset was how light it was.  Admittedly it’s a touch heavier than the BlackJack II, but I’m an AT&T Fuze owner, and the Fuze, while powerful, is by no means a light unit.  But the Jack is.

More after the jump…

Here you can see how much of a difference in heft the Jack has.

HTC Fuze: 5.78oz

E-TEN X800: 5.27oz

Samsung Jack: 3.70oz

That’s a 36% weight difference between the Fuze and Jack.  And it IS noticeable.  That was a key feature in its perceived usefulness for me.

Keyboard

Keyboard in full light

If you were to compare the Jack to the Blackjack II, you’d notice that the keypad spacing has significantly changed, the keys being situated right up to each other.  This close proximity might pose a problem for those with larger hands.  Whereas on the Fuze I can use the flesh of my thumbs to easily utilize its keyboard, the Jack required a bit more precision, and I often found myself using my thumbnails to speed things along.  The lower row of keys contained the Shift, AT&T’s MEdia Net, GPS/ AT&T Telenav Navigator, Space/Symbol key, Ringtone on/off, Camera button, and Messaging.  With regard to the space bar, I felt it should have been a little larger, especially for those users who are heavy texters. One other quirk of the keyboard is that the custom keys are the same color as the regular keys, making it trickier to distinguish between the two. A long press on the Camera button facilitates a screen zoom, and a long press on the Messaging key enables Create Message.

Keyboard backlight at night

The above images also show the keyboard backlight illumination, demonstrating that the keys are quite recognizable in the darker conditions.

D-Pad

Samsung opted for a squared-off D-Pad that sits in about the center of the device, surrounded by the primary phone/navigation controls, such as Send & End, Home (Today), Return and two softkeys.   At first I was concerned that the controls around the D-Pad were going to be a problem and feel perhaps too cramped, but in practice this wasn’t the case for me.  Instead, I found the D-Pad and control keys to be very quick and intuitive to learn.  More importantly, at least from my perspective, the bulk of the handset can be controlled with but a few movements of the thumb without ever having to move the phone in  my hand, making one-handed use a snap.  Additionally, the new D-Pad supports “Turbo-scrolling”, where by holding down a particular direction key the cursor zips in the direction you are pressing.  For some reason though, Turbo-scroll ran faster going up my list of menu items than it did going down.

Left & Right shots:

Here you can see, from left to right, the power button and audio rocker controls.

From the phone’s right side, the Sync/Charge/Headphone adapter cover is visible.

Power/Sync/Audio dongle connector opened:

While it’s convenient that at least in many of the newer Samsung phones they use a similar headset/Sync/AC connector among themselves, it would have been nicer to have a standard microUSB connector, saving the trouble of keeping track of one more AC/Sync cable.  For music enthusiasts, this is a bit of a disappointment in that an included 3.5mm headphone adapter is required for wired headsets.  The Jack’s Bluetooth capabilities support several types of profiles from standard headsets to A2SP stereo supported units, so with the Jack supporting stereo bluetooth, a better option might be using wireless headphones.

Another minor inconvenience is the fact that the i637 Jack’s MicroSD card slot is adjacent to the battery and cannot be removed without the battery itself being removed.

SIM card and MicroSD card slot placement

For folks like me that generally use the memory card for certain program types and don’t swap out cards very much or at all, this is not such a big deal, but could be for those who have a stable of memory cards to cycle through for music or photos or other data types in that you must essentially shut down the device to swap the card out.  The Jack can support up to a 16GB microSD card.

What’s inside the OS

The Samsung Jack runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and is slated to be eligible to receive the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade later in the year. When first booted, the Jack had about 140MB of free RAM available, a respectable amount.  The built-in flash storage runs around 96MB, and of that about 72MB is available.

Using the D-Pad, you can quickly hop down to the desired Today screen item, whether it be Time, Phone Logs, Messaging, appointments, select AT&T services (AT&T Navigator, Xpress Mail, AT&T WiFi, CV Video, My Stuff & Games folder, etc.), and  Settings for Phone Profiles, Wireless Manager, Ringtones, Background Image and Task Manager.

Within Start—>Settings—>Display, users can change the style of the Today screen to one of 13 layout choices, offering flexibility in how one’s Today screen displays information.

Today Screen

In the last screen above, by enabling Start—>Settings, More—>Message Ticker, you can horizontally scroll through SMS and email messages as they are received, showing a message preview.  Moving through the messages is as simple as pressing the right or left arrows on the D-Pad.  Options to enable the Ticker, permit the sender’s image to be displayed and 6 different preview styles to choose are all available.

Start Menu Items

The AT&T Navigator takes advantage of the aGPS (assisted GPS) features of the Samsung Jack, and, freshly started, could find my location in about a minute.  The AT&T Wi-Fi is slated to be able to help users find hotspots, but this functionality didn’t appear enable at review time.

AT&T has loaded a number of multimedia applications that can enable users to access an array of multimedia content, such as it’s online music store, the subscription-based XM Radio or MobiTV (about $8.99 and $9.99 per month respectively).  Also available is C(ellular) V(ideo) Video-on-Demand.  As you can also see from a couple of the pictures above, Samsung also included a few custom skins for the Windows Media Player.

Applications

The versions of Office Mobile included are the read/write capable versions of OneNote, Word, Powerpoint and Excel.  For those of you who are eBay junkies, the Jack includes a front-end for accessing your eBay account and listings/bids.  In addition the Mobile Banking applet features providers such as Citibank, Chase, Wachovia, SunTrust, USAA and Regions, permitting users to securely check balances, pay bills, perform balance transfers, view account history and so forth.

Games & My Stuff

The Samsung comes with a handful of game demos and the ubiquitous Bubble Breaker and Solitaire standbys. By the way, if you’re so inclined, start the Asphalt 4 demo and ask yourself if the starting page female police officer serves to dissuade or in fact entice you to speed…

Don’t get me started on the dangling handcuffs…

Organizer & Settings

Organizer has some handy little apps like Smart Converter, permitting conversion of items such as currency, and practical everyday things when travelling abroad such length, weight, volume, area and degrees Centigrade. Now if you’re a science geek like me, the metric system that just about everyone else in the world uses is largely second nature.   However, when someone in the UK says “It’s a beautiful 20 degrees out” non-metric American Jack owners will be able to whip out their phones and discover the UK resident means it’s 68F.

Semi-Obscure Minutiae: With regard to the screen, I own a Pantech Matrix Pro, and when you compare the two side by side you will notice the Jack looks slightly more washed out.

To be fair, however, I only noticed that because I had another smartphone to compare it to.  By itself the screen is bright and quite readable.

General Functionality

Network/Internet Browsing

In my usage the Jack, an HSDPA capable device, showed 3G data speeds that varied from as low as 233 kbps to as high as 782kbps for a 1MB test file from the mobile test site of DSLreport.com.  In addition, the Jack has the welcome addition of a integrated WiFi to potentially speed up data access near hotspots or home wireless networks. Additionally, the Samsung Jack’s Internet Sharing can be used to tether a Windows laptop for internet browsing, providing road warriors the potential to access the office or the internet wherever they might find themselves.

The Jack possesses only the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 version of Internet Explorer. This is adequate if users concentrate on mobile-enabled websites, but for those that aren’t mobile-compatible, well, I hope you’re not in a hurry to get information.  Something like my Fuze’s Opera Mobile or perhaps the new Skyfire 1.0 would be a definite improvement over the lackluster Pocket IE.

Battery and Call

The Jack’s 1480 mAh battery life was very good as was talk time.  A single charge worked for me for nearly three days with moderate use without much mobile browsing.  For reception, at home the Samsung Jack got about 4 bars reception versus 2 or occasionally 3 bars on my Fuze, and I experienced no dropped calls.  Voicemail was clear as well.  Speakerphone capability can be accessed via the Softkey Menu and selecting Speakerphone and the Jack’s speakerphone was clear in my tests.  The phone also possesses conference calling and voice dialing, the former being handy for impromptu business meetings.

Texting/Emailing

The obvious advantage of the Jack’s frontal keyboard is that it makes texting and emails a snap. With its Pocket Outlook, users can SMS and email to their hearts’ content.  The Jack supports push email via MS Exchange Server, so that email, tasks, contacts, calendars and such can be automagically synchronized.  I was able to easily set up Yahoo and Gmail accounts for POP3/IMAP services.  As previously mentioned, the Message Ticker made browsing emails very easy and convenient.  The Jack’s IM tool, while not particularly new,  still permits users IM support for AOL, Windows Live and Yahoo. With Windows Mobile 6.1’s threaded messaging support, users can quickly browse through message conversations, and for you uber-texters out there, the Turbo Scrolling will come in handy here.

Camera Usage

The Jack comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera that in general did a decent job taking pictures, though occasionally some subjects were slightly blurry, even at about 24” distance from the target. Below are a couple of pictures I took of some Early Girl tomatoes, the left at 12” and the right at about 18”.  The foliage further back was pretty clear, but the tomatoes themselves were slightly blurred.

In general the phone camera worked best at taking picture of general subjects at medium distances as opposed to items a handful of feet away. I would not recommend using the phone for detail-oriented close-ups.

Reds, greens and yellows were well represented in most photos taken.  The camera also has a night shot setting, but these tended to be on the grainy side.  The Camcorder setting offered pedestrian clips when set at either 320 x 240 or 176 x 144  resolutions.  Not terrible, but I don’t think David Lean would have been using these for Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago.

Final Thoughts

The Samsung Jack is a competent phone, with a nice professional-looking form factor. I found it enjoyable to use: comfortable, reasonable performance, relatively easy one-handed use,Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support along with decent aGPS. Its strong battery life, MS Exchange/Office support and relatively light weight might make this an ideal business phone.  It’s not revolutionary by any means, however it’s $99 price after rebate (~$350 without) might make this a tempting entry-level smartphone for those in the Windows Mobile camp or those wanting to delve into the Windows Smartphone arena.

Pros:

• Thin and light
• 5-way D-Pad is very easy to use and navigate around phone
• Good speakerphone capability
• Very good battery life

Cons

• Proprietary Sync/Charge/Audio port
• Keyboard a bit cramped
• Mediocre Internet experience with default Internet Explorer

AT&T Samsung Jack (i637) Specifications:

• Dimensions: 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.5 inches
• Weight: 3.6 ounces
• Battery: 1480 mAh battery
• Talk Time: Up to 7 hours
• Standby Time: Up to 12 days
• Technology: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA*
• Frequency:  850/900/1800/1900 MHz (GSM/GPRS/EDGE); 850/1900/2100 MHz (UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA)*
• Data Transmission:  3.6 Mbps HSDPA, 528 MHz applications processor
• Memory: 256 MB ROM / 256MB RAM
• Display: 2.4 inches, 65k color/TFT colors, 320 x 240 pixels
• TTY Compatible
• Hearing Aid Compatible

Bryan Eley (40 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Bryan is a software tester and network admin for a small multimedia company that deals primarily with the network/PC technology sector, despite the fact that his background is actually in the biological sciences. His first PDA was a Palm m100 back in 2001 and has been fiddling with Pocket PCs and Smartphones for several years now. In 2008 he was a Software Judge for SmartPhone and PocketPC Magazine.