I decided to give the Samsung Blackjack a pass, mainly because it would have meant $500 for a Cingular tainted phone to maintain my contract-free situation. I may consider giving a Windows Mobile Blackjack like device a spin in the future, but for now I decided to stick with Nokia.
While in India I decided on getting the E61 no fewer than three times, and I've decided on the E61 at least twice more this week. The main other contender was the even cheaper and smaller E50, and it was a tough choice. In the end, the two deciding factors were the difficulty in finding a trustworthy vendor of the E50 that was definitely carrying the version with the camera, and perhaps more significantly, the the benefits of the E61's landscape screen orientation when using the bundled web browser.
That web browser issue is actually a little more significant than you may realize if you haven't used Nokia's WebKit derived browser. It deserves all the praise it's gotten, but there's a drawback with how well it renders pages: It doesn't wrap web pages to fit your screen. Even with the E61's wide screen I find myself sometimes having to scroll from left to right to read a paragraph.
My only other complaint about the browser so far is that embedded google maps crash it. It's certainly not Google's fault, but I wouldn't mind if they could code a workaround to at least avoid crashing the browser.