AfterTek

It’s Cingular’s time to unleash a thin, manageable and sexy smartphoneof their own to compete with Verizon Wireless’ Q phone and T-Mobile’s Dash. The newest member of this continuing club is called the Blackjack and it is available with some very interesting features as well as a few that need some further refinement.

The Blackjack is a small, thin 3G world phone. 3G means that it works on Cingular’s latest, third-generation, high-speed UMTS/HSDPA wireless networks (850/1900 MHz) as well as the worldwide GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks (850/900/1800/1900 MHz). What all that means is that this phone should work nearly everywhere on the planet.

The handset itself measures 4.4 by 2.3 by 0.5 inches and weighs only 3.5 ounces. It runs on a 220 MHz Texas Instruments processor and sports 128 MB of ROM (read-only memory) and 64 MB of RAM (random-access memory). There’s a good-looking 2.2-inch backlit color screen, a 1.3 megapixel camera, micro SD card expansion slot, Bluetooth connectivity, travel adapter and data transfer cable.

Like the Q, Dash and a number of other new smartphones, Blackjack runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system and all the MicrosofT-Mobile Office applications packed inside. Cingular also loads the phone with software that lets you browse/buy from Cingular’s Music, Video and Media Net Websites. Cingular wants to get the message across that this is a very media-capable smartphone.

As with other smartphones, a five-way controller located just under the screen handles most of the navigation duties. It lets you move up, down, left or right with a button in the middle to enter a specific program or page. The five-way controller on the Blackjack is very small, flat and round, which can make it difficult to navigate around the screen. On the plus side, Blackjack also has a BlackBerry-style thumb wheel which helps alleviate the problem somewhat.

Unlike other Windows smartphone Blackjack’s phone-dialing number keys are not next to each other. There are letter keys (black) in between the number keys (gray) to give your fingers a little extra room when you’re dialing. There is no feeling about it either way but it is an interesting solution to a common smartphone problem.

All other hardware functions on the Blackjack seemed to work as promised. The phone seemed to open Web pages very quickly probably 20 to 30 percent faster than my T-Mobile Dash which operates on somewhat older/slower data networks. As for software, Internet Explorer opened MSNBC.com quickly but seemed to be very slow when it came to opening Cingular’s audio and video online stores.