Lightning Round: Samsung BlackJack II

The Gadget: The Samsung BlackJack II, a Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone with 3G, GPS and faster hardware.

The Verdict: There’s not much about this in terms of general speed and build that we haven’t said already in the first hands-on, but here are the things we didn’t cover. The 3G is super speedy and pulls down emails and web pages like a champ. Sound quality is on par with other Windows Mobile phones (namely, it’s good), and its battery is also much improved over the BJ1, lasting over the weekend on one charge—with us making a handful of calls and doing a little web browsing and Google mapping. The GPS is pretty awesome when used with the free Google Maps, but has a bit of trouble getting a signal around my apartment. It’s fine when you’re out on the road, even though you’re not really supposed to be using this while driving. For this amount of performance (speediness) and functionality (GPS, 3G), the BlackJack 2 is a pretty good deal. If you’re a fan of the BlackJack platform, this isn’t a revolutionary improvement, but it’s definitely a solid evolutionary one. [AT&T]