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Pros
- Sharp camera and HD camcorder.
- HD playback over HDMI really works.
- Capacitive touch screen.
- Plenty of media features.
- Wi-Fi.
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Cons
- Very poor battery life.
- Takes a long time to boot up.
- Proprietary HD cable not in the box.
- Buggy media players.
- Expensive.
Samsung Instinct HD (Sprint) Specs
| 802.11x/Band(s): | Yes |
| Bands: | 1900 |
| Bands: | 850 |
| Battery Life (As Tested): | 2 hours 31 minutes |
| Bluetooth: | Yes |
| Camera Flash: | Yes |
| Camera: | Yes |
| Form Factor: | Candy Bar |
| High-Speed Data: | 1xRTT |
| High-Speed Data: | EVDO Rev A |
| Megapixels: | 5 MP |
| Operating System as Tested: | Other |
| Phone Capability / Network: | CDMA |
| Physical Keyboard: | Yes |
| Screen Details: | 16M-color AMOLED capacitive touch screen |
| Screen Details: | 320-by-480 |
| Screen Size: | 3.2 inches |
| Service Provider: | Sprint |
| Storage Capacity (as Tested): | 84 MB |
The Samsung Instinct HD is the first truly high-def video phone in the U.S., but you pay a heavy price for that in several ways. The Instinct HD gets its name from its capable built-in HD camcorder, plus its HD output for displaying video on a large television screen. It's also a decent phone, but it has poor battery life and seems to be buggy. Still, its feature set makes it one of our
Call Quality and Features
The Instinct HD is a dual-band EV-DO Rev A device (850/1900 MHz). It also includes Wi-Fi. Voice quality was crisp and clear on the caller's side, but a little harsh through the earpiece. Turning the Instinct HD up to maximum volume increased the harshness, but not the comprehensibility. Reception was weak; I only saw one bar of 1X in a rural area where a
The menu system is arranged well, with five main icons across the bottom: Favorites, Main, Fun, My Stuff, and Web. Annoyingly, the home touch key defaults to Favorites, which you must either populate or skip past all the time, just like on the first two Instincts. The TeleNav-powered Sprint Navigator locked onto my position quickly and offered turn-by-turn directions with clear voice prompts; the app also worked in landscape mode when I tilted the Instinct HD on its side. The accelerometer, and UI for that matter, didn't always match up properly; I found myself repeatedly tilting it one way to enter text in landscape mode, and then tilting it back to portrait mode to read the next screen.
In a real surprise, Opera Mobile 9.7 (not
HD Media Support
So what's HD about the Instinct HD? First of all, it has an awesome camera. Recorded HD (1280-by-720!) and VGA videos were sharp, super-smooth, and well lit; only the flat colors and slightly pixelated look gave away the tiny cell phone lens. Photos taken with the 5-megapixel still mode looked very sharp outdoors, with plenty of detail in bricks, grass, and tree leaves. There was quite a bit of noise in darker rooms indoors, but shots were acceptably sharp and detailed with enough light. Shutter speeds were about one second even with auto-focus, and the phone recovered almost instantly after every shot.
To play back HD video (either recorded or sideloaded), you have to attach a $29.99 HDMI cable, sold separately. I converted a few 720p movie trailers to MP4, sideloaded them to the microSD card, and hooked up the Instinct HD to a 42-inch plasma HDTV. Voila: instant, portable high definition video, as sharp and colorful as it was on the PC, without having to set anything on the device—it's plug and play. The video even played simultaneously on the Instinct HD's screen. (The TV only shows video output, incidentally; not UI graphics.)
Other media features here are flexible, but inconvenient and buggy at times. You need to pull off the stiff battery cover and remove the battery to replace the memory card. My 16GB SanDisk microSD card worked fine, and Sprint tosses a 4GB card in the box. The phone has a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack. AAC, WMA, and MP3 music tracks sounded clear over
I ran into several glitches playing music and video. The volume inexplicably started deafeningly loud on every track for the first quarter-second, and the unit hard reset itself in the middle of an MP3 track. Another glitch: one time the unit froze on boot-up and displayed a "download" crash screen after I loaded some new music. Popping the battery and microSD card reset it. The video player oddly forced me into the TV app when it was done, even though I hadn't been using Sprint TV.
The Instinct HD has the right hardware for gaming with its large touch screen and accelerometer. But it wouldn't run any of our Java benchmarks, and the one preloaded game demo ran poorly. It appears all that CPU horsepower is geared toward HD video.
Conclusions
At $249.99 with a two-year contract and after a $100 mail-in rebate, the Instinct HD is an expensive phone. Fortunately, it's powerful enough to put next to Sprint's touch screen smartphones, and the data plan costs are similar. That said, the $149
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 2 hours 31 minutes
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