Jeff Atwood : Samsung Blackjack tips and tricks

 

Samsung Blackjack tips and tricks

The business development team at Vertigo recently standardized on the Samsung Blackjack phone.

It's fantastic hardware. The smartphone has finally shrunk to a pocketable form factor after all these years. Ironically, it's the software that needs to improve -- the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS on the phone leaves a lot to be desired. It's not exactly intuitive.

I dug through a massive tips and tricks thread trying to figure out ways to work efficiently in Windows Mobile on the Blackjack. Here's a summary of the best:

• Hard reset the phone by holding down UP and POWER to boot. It will ask to confirm.
• You can adjust the brightness of the screen in Settings under Power (scroll down)
• Pressing and holding the Home button brings up the task manager
• Pressing and holding the jog dial brings up a list of apps
• Pressing the power button brings up the quicklist
• Hold down message key to turn off backlight on screen.
• Fn + B = Toggle Bluetooth
• Press the V key for PAGE DOWN and the T key for PAGE UP.
• Hold down any key while typing to get its "alternate" character. i.e. Hold down the Q for a moment and you'll get the + symbol. This is nice if you don't like hitting Caps/Shift Q to get it.
• if you are reading an email, press the center d-pad "action" button... it will take you to the new contact entry with that persons email address already filled in.
• Apparently the phone doesn't support automatic keylock, you have to hold down the "end call" key for 3-4 seconds and it locks the phone.
• When you have a URL in the address bar hold down the BACK button above the red hang up button and it will delete the entire URL.
• In any of the edit fields (contacts, I.E., and others) if you hold down Undo (top right U-Turn with an arrow) it will delete the contents of the field you are in.
• There is no way to get periodic reminder tones for missed calls or messages. This little app addresses that deficiency.
• Holding down the back button on the right hand edge of the device launches the Camera app for taking pictures.

If you want to sync data between the phone and the computer, you can use ActiveSync on Windows XP, or Windows Mobile Device Center on Windows Vista. WMDC replaces ActiveSync, but is still in Beta 3 as of right now.

You'll probably want a few apps on your phone. Remember this is Windows Mobile 5.0, not PocketPC, so be sure to pick the right version of the app. I highly recommend starting with a freeware registry editor such as PHM Registry Editor. There are a lot of cool settings that are only exposed through the phone's registry*. I installed "regedit.Stngr_ARM.CAB" on the blackjack and it worked fine for basic registry editing. Once of the first things you'll want to do is turn off the "application lock", either via editing the registry or by downloading and running a small registry edit file named "appunlock.cab" on your phone.

Battery life is OK, but not great. That's probably why it comes with an extra battery and a standalone battery charger out of the box. The phone does trickle charge over USB when it's connected, however, I couldn't get it to charge at all via USB when the battery was very low and the phone wouldn't turn on. There are pictures of the extended battery in action here. This might be a good upgrade if you're running into battery issues.

The phone has a lot in common with the Motorola Q, so often tweaks and files for the Q will work on the Blackjack. You can download new start page designs that work fine from koodezine and qusers. Here's the one I'm using:

And remember, the phone accepts MicroSD cards for additional storage-- they're tiny compared to their SD and MiniSD brethren.

* that's right, there's a Windows Registry on a phone. Depressing but true.

posted on Friday, January 12, 2007 4:50 PM by jatwood

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