Samsung Jacks up AT&T

AT&T and Samsung on Thursday announcement the imminent availability of the Jack, a successor to the exceedingly popular BlackJack and BlackJack II. The handset, also to be known as the i637, goes on sale May 19 and will retail for $100 with a rebate, two-year service agreement, and the other usual restrictions.

The earlier BlackJack models have been, according to Samsung, the best-selling series of Windows Mobile phones ever. The significant upgrade in the new Jack's candy bar-style handset appears to be the 3.2-megapixel video-capable camera, an improvement from the 2 Mpx model in the BlackJack II. The phone will ship with 256 MB of RAM (up from 155 MB with the BlackJack II), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and GPS. Like its predecessor it has a microSD slot, and can support cards up to 16 GB (up from 4GB). It'll also ship with Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile and Windows Mobile 6.1, though Samsung says that the handset will be 6.5-ready whenever that operating system is released.

Oddly, the Jack images released make it look as much like Motorola's Q9h phone, or even a BlackBerry Curve, as it does a member of the Samsung product line. The keypad in particular is restyled a bit from that of the BlackJack II, which was released in the olden days late 2007. The QWERTY keys are wider, extending to the very edge of the handset and including no spacing between, and the navigation keys around the D-pad have been rearranged as well.

No US availability beyond AT&T was announced. Confusingly, Canada already has a Samsung Jack, offered by Rogers; that's thought to have something to do with a lawsuit filed by Research in Motion that accused Samsung of confusing the marketplace by using "black" in the name. (No word has ever been received of the lawsuit-prone Canadian manufacturer suing Vegas for those confusingly-named card games, but we'd love to see RIM try.)