It’s amazing how they pack so much into so little these days. The new Imate K-Jam from Leaf Wireless — sporting a new sliding keyboard and Windows Mobile 5.0 — offers quite a bit despite its small shell. It’s a chunky phone, but is not too large to carry easily in your jeans pocket. With dimensions of 108mm by 58mm, it’s much bigger than the earlier Jam incarnation.
The key feature of this phone is the spacious, sliding keyboard. When you slide the K-Jam’s keyboard out from under the phone, the screen immediately changes to landscape, wide-screen mode for more intensive word processing or other functions. It’s a clever little feature, meaning that the phone can be used to edit and read fairly long and heavyweight documents.
After the novelty wore off, I still found myself using the K-Jam’s keyboard. This is a significant leap forward from Imate’s older, flagship PDA2K phone, where the keyboard was irritating, if not almost impossible, to use. The K-Jam’s keys are a nice, comfortable size for a mini-PDA phone and the device generally sat well in my hand while typing.
The K-Jam comes with Microsoft’s much-anticipated new mobile operating system, Windows Mobile 5.0. At first glance, it’s not a wildly different departure in terms of aesthetics and functionality, although there are some improvements in the power-saving department.
Probably the most obvious difference from Windows Mobile 5.0 is that the phone at last sports a battery indicator as a default on the mobile desktop. When you consider that battery life is a key issue for a PDA and is displayed as standard in many other rival mobile operating systems, the mind boggles at how Microsoft could have left the battery indicator off in the first place.
I found the way the contacts categories work a bit irritating. Whereas in Windows Mobile 3 they were a short, one-click drop-down menu away, it now appears to be fairly complex and not intuitive to access the contacts categories. This will irritate people with extended contact lists who need to separate their personal and business contacts, as it is now not simple to access the various categories.
But one very good point is that unlike Windows Mobile 3, I didn’t — despite pushing the phone to the very limits — experience a single crash. Anecdotally, it would appear that Windows Mobile 5.0 is a much more stable operating system. The pocket PowerPoint viewer also worked amazingly well and looked impressive in the K-Jam’s wide-screen mode.
Another clever feature of the K-Jam is its nifty collapsible stylus. In an effort to cram as much as possible into such a small phone, the stylus neatly unfolds as you take it out of the phone and then folds again when you return it. The K-Jam’s speaker is also louder and clearer than that of the previous Jam phone.
If you are one of those who use the cameras on cellphones, you will be happy to hear that this phone comes with a 1,3-megapixel camera, and now also a flash. The pictures I took also came out much better than those on the previous Imate Jam.
A disappointing feature of the K-Jam is its plastic casing. One of the really sexy features of the older Imate Jam was its clean metal case and its almost iPod-like shape and look. The K-Jam is now held together by a plastic case and just does not have that stylish, edgy look of its sleeker predecessor.
I was also a bit disappointed to see no innovation on the phone’s external buttons. One of the best navigation features I have ever come across on cellphone-PDAs is the multidirectional roller on the Sony Ericsson P900/P800 range, allowing you to control almost everything from a single button. It’s about time the powerful Imate phones start doing something like this.
The K-Jam appears to be a slightly more serious phone than the first Jam release. It’s a powerful work phone aimed more at the working professional than its predecessor by virtue of its heavy-duty keyboard.
You can write a book on this phone.
Main specs
TI OMAP 850 200MHz processor
128Mb ROM (47,5Mb available)
64MB RAM
Quad-band GSM Radio with GPRS/EDGE — 850/900/1Â 800/1Â 900Mhz
Integrated Wi-Fi Radio — 802,11b/g
Bluetooth 1.2 (2.0 update expected soon)
miniSD slot
Integrated stereo speakers
2.8″ QVGA LCD – 240 by 320 resolution
Built-in slide-out QWERTY thumb-board
1,3MP CMOS camera with flash light
miniUSB port (charging and syncing)
2,5mm stereo headphone/headset jack
Windows Mobile 5.0