Design & Features
4.5
Instinct does, in fact, look a little like an iPhone with its full touchscreen and rectangular candybar body. A little longer, narrower, and thicker than iPhone, Instinct is eye-catching and plain all at once, with its reflective silver faceplate and darker, soft-grip sides and back panel. Instinct is made of plastic and feels pretty solid and well-balanced in hand. After a few weeks of using my review unit it’s got one small scratch on the bottom of the front panel but no other battle scars or damage of any sort.
Samsung supplanted Instinct’s 3.15” touch display with three touch-sensitive controls — Back, Home, and Phone — lined up in a row just below the screen. I liked the ability to instantly get to phone mode from anywhere in the device’s many menus, and the back button also proved quite handy as I got to know Instinct. I also liked the hardware lock/power key and 3.5mm audio jack, both of which are mounted on the top panel of the phone.
The phone’s display is great to look at and pretty good to the touch. With a 240 x 432 resolution capable of 262K colors, the widescreen looked excellent whether its display menus, still images or video. I have to say that the screen was just a bit cramped for Web browsing, though, especially given the iPhone comparisons that Sprint invited with their marketing tactics.
Instinct is so chock full of features that it’s hard to list them all. The operating system is built around easy, customizable access to the device’s myriad applications. As such, there’s no background image or “skin” to be set on any of the menu screens (you can choose your own wallpaper for the locked-mode screensaver), and you can’t change the system font. What you can do, though, is customize three of the four menu screens with shortcuts to the applications, Web bookmarks, contacts, and playlists you use most. It’s a very utilitarian approach to customization, and while I did miss the personal touch of a background image on my menu screens, I also really liked the one-touch access to so many different features and services.
Okay, so on to those features and services. There’s full navigation with turn-by-turn directions and location-based searching that’s all powered by an onboard GPS chip. There’s a media player that can play audio or video from an SD card, via various streaming services, or take you to the Sprint Music Store so you can buy new tunes by the track. There’s Sprint TV and Sprint Radio support (the latter is streaming audio, not FM radio). There’s a 2MP camera with video capture. There’s Email and Web browsing, and SMS/MMS messaging, if no Mobile IM. There are vertical and horizontal on-screen QWERTY boards and a handwriting recognition mode. And there’s a great voice command system that ties a lot of it together, letting you press a side-panel button and say things like, “Call Don,” or “Go to Search ... Pizza” in order to get the device to do your bidding.
Like, For Example, You will text a hugely long message, and then right at the end when your at the point of sending it, the screen blinks and then freezes. Forcing you to remove the battery and waiting for it to turn back on. And once it loads again, you get the wonderful suprise of your message no longer being there. Making you retype it ! :[ - Idk if this happens to everyone, but it happens to me normally about 5 times a day.
It has hardly anything you can customize either. Again, For Example, Your menu and main color scheme is an ugly grey color. You only get to see your screen saver about 5 seconds. Not very many ringers included. Etc.
-The internet is hard to use, if you try to touch a search/URL bar, you have to continuesly click on it to get it to load. So make sure you have long nails too, because the search/URL bars are extremely small.
-When you talk on the phone, make sure it's in a quiet place, because the volume is very low.
ALSO ! The TV/Radio function is the worst about it ! In a phone that REQUIRES you to have the certain "Everything" plan, the tv/radio is horrible. The TV's quality is horrible. Everything comes in blocky, and it is always freezing and taking forever to load.
I understand that everyone thinks OMG! A touch phone ! But really, they cannot be worth all the fuss. They are hard to use and can be a huge pain in the butt ! Especially when your typing a message on an all touch phone and when you touch the space bar, it types a B or an X.
Also, I know that the touch phones are just really beginning to take off - And so i know you cannot expect everything about it - But lets just hope that the Samsung Instinct 2 is alot better than this one, because otherwise i think there would be more unhappy customers.
There are a couple positives on the other side (As if it matters) -
-The MP3 player
-Great Camera (only color pictures, and no "fun frames" :[ )
-The different alarms and things under the "Clock" menu.
-SOME things in "Email"
Sorry to say this, But i've owned this phone since Christmas, and i am REALLY missing regular "Push" Keys. :\
took a couple of weeks to get used to the new layout/features but overall this seems like a very good interface and I have had it for almost a year....no flashy customization, games, or apps like the iphone, but its smaller size fits in my pocket well, the selectable keyboard is way better than the iphone, not many mis-types.....and the video capture is amazing for a phone(the iphone does not even offer video) alarms/calendar is good, GPS is solid, emails great, voice command/livesearch awesome......the screen looks good but on this smaller size it is not great for the internet, but you can do what you need to.....I have gotten several mobile updates that have modified the unit for the better, and hope they keep offering more goodies for it