Posts Tagged ‘Samsung’

Samsung BlackJack II best smartphones

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

samsung-bj2

samsung-bj2

Sometimes it’s the unsung workhorses that deserve the lion’s share of the praise, and that might just be the case with the aging Samsung BlackJack II — a phone that you probably wouldn’t expect to top Consumer Reports’ January 2009 ratings of popular smartphones. Sure, it may not be the shiniest device on the market these days, but you’ve got to admit it’s just about as functional as you’d ever need a business-class handset to be with GPS, HSDPA, and WinMo 6.1, which gladly sucks up Exchange accounts until you’re blue in the face. When you factor in the fact that it runs just $80 these days on an AT&T contract in a choice of four colors… okay, yeah, we can kinda see it. The iPhone 3G and T-Mobile G1 don’t play second fiddle terribly often these days (they were way down in the middle of the Consumer Reports pack in this testing cycle, in fact), so let’s just let this old dog have one more moment in the spotlight, shall we?

Unreleased Helio slider surfaces

Sunday, December 14th, 2008
helio-f400-1

helio-f400-1

Described to us once by those in the know as “a project that would’ve been,” this Helio-badged, Samsung-built, multimedia-happy slider just surfaced on the Heliocity forums. Samsung shipped tweaked versions of this handset (based on the Samsung F400) with B&O and Armani branding, but there’s no telling if “Helio by Virgin” still has plans to bring this to market. More shots after the break.