There are only a couple of bummers about the Samung Blackjack on Cingular / AT&T Wireless.  One of them out of the box you can tell is poor battery life.  They even give you 2 regular batteries to proactively combat this complaint.  But who wants to carry around a 2nd battery?  How practicle is it?  Not much really.  And I guess Cingular/AT&T and Samsung listened. 

I was excited when I found out about the Cingular offer for a free Extended Battery for those that purchased it recently without one (new boxes are reportedly coming with 1 standard battery and 1 extended battery).  But some of the buzz on the next questioned the validity of the offer because there was no letter, text message, email, notice, post on the Cingular site officially pointing people to this basically unpublished promotion.  If you called customer service it was hit-and-miss whether the rep knew about the “rebate” plan for the free battery.

So I filled out the web-rebate form and crossed my fingers.  Worst case scenario, I lost 3 minutes of my time.

BOY WAS I EXCITED TO SEE THE MAILMAN…read on to see why…

The envelope arrived and inside was the free extended battery for the Samsung i607 Blackjack and a new battery cover.  Immediately you’ll see that the new battery is thicker than the old one.  And the new battery cover is longer.  At first you wonder why, until you install the battery…

 

 

  When you install the extended battery, you’ll notice that it no longer sits flush with the inside like with the regular battery.  It pops up and thus the standard battery cover cannot be used.   

Basically since the battery is fatter, they created another batter cover that would make the profile smooth and goes up to the camera area.  The result is profile that’s “filled out” to the thickness of the camera buldge at the top of the phone.

 

 

One thing you’ll also notice is “cutouts” on each side of the battery door cover so that the swing-out covers for the ports on each side can open and give you access to the USB port and MicroSD card slot.

 

Good niews, the extended battery fits into the originally provided battery charger module:

 

It is also MUCH easier to take the battery cover off and on.  This was a major complaint with the standard battery cover.  You had to force the cover off somehow, usually incorporating useless efforts of yelling “abracadabra!” and “open sesame!” to the phone and hoping that you could force that darn cover to come off.  The exact opposite is true with the new cover.  It actually comes off TOO easily in my opinion.  I recently lightly tumbled the phone onto the desk and POP, the phone, extended battery and battery cover flew apart like some acrobatic show of electronic parts.  It wasn’t a drop, it wasn’t thrown down.  It was a light tumble from 2 inches off the desk and this explosion happened.. 

It is also MUCH easier to take the battery cover off and on.  This was a major complaint with the standard battery cover.  You had to force the cover off somehow, usually incorporating useless efforts of yelling “abracadabra!” and “open sesame!” to the phone and hoping that you could force that darn cover to come off.  The exact opposite is true with the new cover.  It actually comes off TOO easily in my opinion.  I recently lightly tumbled the phone onto the desk and POP, the phone, extended battery and battery cover flew apart like some acrobatic show of electronic parts.  It wasn’t a drop, it wasn’t thrown down.  It was a light tumble from 2 inches off the desk and this explosion happened.. ….but who’s complaining?  I now have 3 batteries and the extended battery allows me to fully utilize video and other battery hogging activities like bluetooth without worries of loosing access to my phone because of poor battery life.

It is also MUCH easier to take the battery cover off and on.  This was a major complaint with the standard battery cover.  You had to force the cover off somehow, usually incorporating useless efforts of yelling “abracadabra!” and “open sesame!” to the phone and hoping that you could force that darn cover to come off.  The exact opposite is true with the new cover.  It actually comes off TOO easily in my opinion.  I recently lightly tumbled the phone onto the desk and POP, the phone, extended battery and battery cover flew apart like some acrobatic show of electronic parts.  It wasn’t a drop, it wasn’t thrown down.  It was a light tumble from 2 inches off the desk and this explosion happened.. ….but who’s complaining?  I now have 3 batteries and the extended battery allows me to fully utilize video and other battery hogging activities like bluetooth without worries of loosing access to my phone because of poor battery life.Now this phone is really a killer smartphone on the market. 



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