(this review was written by a user of blackjack2.info, not ian douglas)

Well, how does the Blackjack 2 stand up to competition.

First off some background on my previous phones, what I was looking for when purchasing a new phone, problems, solutions, and finally, was it worth it. My last four phone were either smartphones, or pocket pc phones. The first was a T-Mobile SDA, then a MDA, followed by a Wing and finally back to an MDA. The SDA was the worst phone I ever owned. Too small of a screen. Keypad overcrowded, and the most annoying center joystick ever. The Wing was alright. Newer OS, nice layout, good finish, good build quality. WiFi. Sometimes slow. The MDA, old, but built like a tank. This is a phone that refused to die. Support from a rom, software, and tweakability is awesome. Poor battery life , and at times sluggish. I have also owned several Palm, Clie, and Pocket PCs prior to the smartphones.

So what was I looking for when choosing a new phone.
1. GPS
2. Smartphone
3. Decent on-board memory and snappy performance.

I wanted a phone I could use during the day at work for an organizer. I also wanted to be able to use it on my road bicycle for routing and track logging, hence the GPS.

To be honest with you, when I first purchased it the BJ2, I thought I made a terrible mistake. Things were way to geared for AT&T. Being I use T-Mobile this was annoying. After finding some most needed tweaks and hacks from this site, xda-developers.com, and Myblackjack2.com, I was finally able to get it to be the phone it should have been to begin with.

I changed the homepage, got Opera to play nice, voice recognition,TCPMP, and added some performance and shortcut tweaks. I am very happy with the BJ2 now. It makes a good replacement for a full blown Pocket PC phone. Sure it doesn't have the touchscreen, but to be honest with you I really don't miss it. I was always worried of the screen getting damaged on my MDA. The ability to edit Word and Excel document is still there, even if in a limited fashion. Texts well, the keyboard is not too small, not too big. The speed is sufficient, and I have yet to have it freeze up or require a reboot. The GPS, with the addition of Garmin XT is great. I tested it head to head with my sisters Garmin Streetpilot and to be honest with you the Garmin XT mapping was more accurate.

To say in closing, you wont be dissappointed with the BlackJack2. Its a great phone with great potential once tweaked. I can only hope that once the WM6.1 upgrade is available, one of the many great rom cookers out there will be able to make it even better. I think that is the only hold up to getting some custom roms out onto the net. Reverse engineering anyone?

FRH