Samsung's Revised Blackjack to Premiere with AT&T

Samsung announced at the CTIA Wireless show in San Francisco yesterday that its Blackjack II smartphone will be available later this year through AT&T. The i617 is much like its predecessor in appearance and profile, but has undergone some design tweaks.

Most notably missing from the handset is the scroll wheel, which made the Blackjack behave much like a Blackberry. It has been replaced by an iPod-style jogwheel above the keypad.

This is AT&T's first smartphone to support its Video Share service, which is a live one-way video feed that requires a 3G connection and two phones that mutually support streaming video. It also has built-in GPS including TeleNav GPS Navigator; a powerful turn-by-turn direction and mapping application, a built-in RSS Reader client, a 2 megapixel camera, and a marginally larger screen than its predecessor.

Many of the standards of the Blackjack have been brought along to the new model, such as HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP) support for AT&T's CV programming, and quad-band world roaming.

The BlackJack II will retail for $149.99 with a two-year contract and mail-in rebate.

AT&T's repertoire of desirable smartphones continues to grow, offering full support for iPhone, various Blackberry and Palm Treo devices, as well as Windows Mobile 6-driven devices from numerous manufacturers. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Blackjack II would be the first smartphone to feature support for its new System Center Mobile Device Manager, which will enable the device to run as a full-fledged, secure Windows network client.