I’ve had my Samsung Blackjack i600v for over 2 years and it has been an excellent mobile phone. In that time I haven’t treated the mobile phone with any special care, other than to make sure I don’t put my car keys in the same pocket and as a by product – it looks nearly as good as when I bought it.

It was the first mobile phone I’ve owned by Samsung and also the first with a ‘large screen’. While it certainly isn’t a large screen by today’s standards, it was definitely sizable at the time and coupled with great colour reproduction – has been very easy to use. I was really worried about the screen when I first bought the Blackjack and was overly cautious with it. For the first few days, I was so paranoid I was going to buy a case for the Samsung mobile phone, however opted against it in the end as I thought it went against the slimness of the design. After two years of ownership, I’m pleased with the decision not to go with the case as with limited ‘special care’ – the screen has lasted through more than two years and is still in good condition.

Features of the Samsung Blackjack I liked:

1. Windows Mobile 5
2. Clean, consistent and fast navigation
3. Predictive text
4. Battery life
5. Slim profile

The feature rich operating system on the Samsung Blackjack has been a joy to use, in this particular case it was Windows Mobile 5 – however I could upgraded to Windows Mobile 6 I think. The navigation throughout the phone is consistent and predictable, which I personally like and rate highly. All of the features that you use on a day to day basis are easy to get to and if you use some features of the phone that aren’t prominently placed in the navigation – you can setup shortcuts to make it as fast as factory fitted navigation.

Features of the Samsung Blackjack that I disliked or needed improvement:

1. Sporadic crashes in Windows Mobile
2. Unclear grouping of QUERTY keys into a standard mobile phone pad configuration
3. Camera quality

In typical Microsoft style though, the Windows Mobile 5 operating system isn’t without its hiccups and from time to time (maybe 2-3 times per year) – the operating system crashes and becomes completely unresponsive – even the power button doesn’t work. As soon as I take the battery out, immediately put it back in – the phone reboots and it functions exactly as you’d expect for another 4-6 months without turning it off.

When I first got the Samsung Blackjack, I was unsure how the keys were going to function with the grouping of more than one key to form the ‘traditional’ number pad interface. After using it for a little while it made complete sense but even I don’t think that it is clear enough as from time to time I still find myself scanning the keyboard interface and additional markings for the button in question.

While one of the features I really liked about the Blackjack was Windows Mobile, it also is the reason for a small criticism as well. Settings in the phone that you use sporadically, normally require me to go hunting for, as I can never remember exactly which section of the phone configuration that specific setting lives under. I think a lot of that is just labelling or grouping of different settings within the control panel. After using Windows on the desktop for so long, you kind of assume everything functions the same way and when it doesn’t – it is slightly irritating. While it sounds as though it is a  harsh criticism, it’d normally take no more than 15-20 seconds at worst to find the setting I was chasing – so I suppose it is hardly worth complaining about.

I have been very impressed with the Samsung Blackjack; it is slim, light, feature rich and has been a very robust mobile phone.

I mentioned in July that I’d had a poor experience with my CoolerMaster 550w Extreme power supply and that recently the fan wasn’t working consistently, causing it to get hot, which resulted in my computer crashing or needing to shut down.

To resolve that problem, I dropped into the local computer shop on my way home from work and picked up some replacement parts. True to my word, I didn’t buy another CoolerMaster product – that many failures within a given brand just isn’t natural. I had asked Jacob for his recommendation and he suggested an Antec and I went with the Antec TruePower 550w version.

As soon as I began unpacking it, it felt as though it was going to be a good product. The packaging was well organised with good protection around the actual power supply unit. All of the cabling was pre-wrapped in cable tidy gear, making everything very neat. The power supply itself had a considerable number of leads on it but it also came with four other complete sets of detachable leads; fantastic as I don’t need them currently so it just reduces the clutter even further.

After getting everything back together, I booted it up and couldn’t even hear the power supply – just the way it’s meant to be. The computer had been running for a few hours and I couldn’t even feel the warmth through the top of my aluminium Lian Li computer case.

While only having had it in my computer for about four hours at this point, so far I am very impressed with the Antec power supply and hope that it continues to serve me well in the coming years.

At the end of 2008, I felt my geek prowess was fading and I rebuilt my desktop computer to reestablish my geek-fu.

Immediately after I purchased the new computer parts and assembed it, everything went along without a hitch for quite some time. Unfortunately, I had a really bad run of harwdare problems which began with my CoolerMaster 550w Extreme power supply making a whurring noise, which when replaced was essentially dead on arrival. After the next replacement arrived, it worked just fine – however it seemed that I had a problem with my Asus GeForce 8800GT video card; the first Asus product I’ve owned that has not performed flawlessly for its entire lifecycle. After getting that sorted out, happy days and I finally had my working desktop computer back which was great.

Over the last two months, I’ve been hearing reports from Claire that she felt my computer was warmer than it should be. Given that I was always feeling it in the evening after work, I never noticed it so dismissed the comment. Approximately a fortnight ago my older brother Andrew made the same comment, to the extent that he even turned my computer off. At that point, clearly something wasn’t right so I investigated further and to my surprise I find that the second replacement CoolerMaster power supply fan has failed. The machine still boots up fine, however after a relatively short amount of time (less than 2 hours) of operation, it crashes and I’m forced to reboot the machine to continue working.

I cannot believe that the power supply has failed again & it’ll be the last time that I buy a CoolerMaster product – that many failures just isn’t normal.