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Pros
- Good voice quality and music and video playback features.
- Fun to use.
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Cons
- Buggy reception indicator.
- Disappointing Web browser.
- No instant messaging client.Watch the Samsung Instinct Video Review!
Samsung Instinct (Sprint) Specs
| Screen Size | 3.1 |
Don't let the prospect of an even-better iPhone get you down, Sprint subscribers. The Samsung Instinct ($129.99 list with two-year contract) is coming on June 20, giving you an
The 2.17 by 4.57 by .49-inch, 4.5-ounce phone is a little squarer around the edges when compared with the iPhone, and it's a bit lighter, but still satisfyingly solid feeling. The 3.1-inch, 240 by 432-pixel display is slightly smaller and less-sharp than the iPhone's 3.5-inch, 480 by 320-pixel screen. Nonetheless, it's clear and bright, but tends to get washed out in direct sunlight.
Let's start with the phone part, after all, it is a phone. And hooray – it's a better one than the iPhone. The Instinct's reception is just so-so, but it gets earpiece and speakerphone volume and sound quality right, delivering voices that sound deep and loud. The mic is more of a mixed bag; on the other end of calls, I sounded even more nasal than usual, and calls made from the speakerphone echoed a bit.
The Instinct comes bundled with a stereo headset, and it also works with standard 3.5mm music headphones. The handset paired automatically with our Plantronics 590 headset and delivered good voice quality over Bluetooth. But I couldn't trigger voice dialing over Bluetooth–to activate the generally solid VoiceSignal voice dialing, you need to press a button on the side of the phone.
The Instinct got almost four and a half hours of talk time, a pretty decent amount considering its large, bright screen. The phone also comes with a spare battery and USB charging cable, which is unusual, and a direct shot at the iPhone, which has a non-removable battery.
The Instinct features visual voicemail, where you choose messages to listen to, in any order you'd like, from a list on the voicemail screen, just like on the iPhone. For syncing, iTunes is replaced by two programs, Sprint Desktop Sync for contacts and Media Manager for media files. There's no way to sync calendars or notes, and no Mac support.
To navigate the Instinct, you use tapping and swiping motions that should be familiar to anyone who's seen an iPhone commercial. (There's no pinching, though–this isn't a multi-touch screen.) To scroll through lists, you drag the screen–fortunately, you don't have to hunt down a scroll bar. To enter text, you use an iPhone-esque virtual keyboard, but it doesn't correct your spelling like the iPhone's does, but the phone does vibrate slightly each time you press a key so you know you've made contact.—
More Than Just A Phone
Like with the iPhone and devices like the
The Main menu offers e-mail, threaded text and picture messaging (but no instant messaging), visual voicemail, GPS navigation, and some other miscellaneous applications. The e-mail app is easy to set up, and adds Outlook Web Access to the typical list of Webmail and POP/IMAP options. This is very cool, since it lets many people get corporate e-mail into the Instinct's e-mail app without the help of an IT department. Mail can be 'pushed' if you'd like, with mail alerts interrupting whatever else you're doing. The mail client shows text-only messages and strips HTML messages down to basic text. You can attach files to send, but you can't read attachments you receive. The GPS navigation client is Sprint's typical Telenav service, which delivers loud, clear voice prompts and will even reroute you around traffic jams.
On the Instinct's second panel, "Fun," you'll find media applications and games. To put media on the phone, either pop it onto a MicroSD card (our 8GB card worked fine, and the phone comes with a 2GB card) or hook your phone up to a Windows XP or Vista PC using the included USB cable and run the Media Manager app, which scours your hard drive for media files and transcodes them into Instinct-friendly formats. This isn't really necessary for music files--unprotected AAC, MP3, WMA files and those bought from the Sprint Music Store are supported–but it's very useful for video, which ends up on the device as 320 by 240-pixel or 320 by 416-pixel MP4 files running at 30 frames per second. Both music and video sound good over wired or Bluetooth headsets, and video downloaded from my PC looked delightfully sharp, whether it started out as a M4V, AVI or WMV file. The Instinct can also run a wide variety of Java games downloadable from Sprint, which you can store in the phone's 32MB of onboard memory.
Two icons are devoted to Sprint's dozens of channels of streaming radio and video. There's a lot of content there, but Sprint TV has a tendency to choke or to appear blocky from time to time; it's nowhere near the quality of Verizon or AT&T's MediaFLO broadcast TV. Sprint chalked it up to "network enhancements and testing." Also, the streaming channels don't work over Bluetooth headsets, and that's not a bug.
The 2-megapixel camera takes surprisingly sharp photos, with no low-light blur. But shots taken outdoors showed blown out bright areas and underexposed shadows. That said, it still beats the iPhone's camera hands- down. And like with Apple's camera, the Instinct's isn't heavy on options. All you get is the option to switch between saving images to the memory card or to internal memory. The video camera mode takes decent 320 by 240 videos at between 10 and 14 frames per second.
The Instinct's "Web" panel has icons for the browser, Microsoft Live Voice Search, and Handmark weather, news, sports and movie-time apps. If you've seen other Sprint phones with On Demand, the Handmark apps will look familiar; they're basically fast, easy-to-use Internet information widgets.
The Web browser shows standard Web pages, but it isn't quite as compatible with Javascript and DHTML as the iPhone's Safari browser. Links can also be very hard to click on, unless you zoom in on them. Combined with a page rendering speed that felt far slower than Sprint's fast EVDO Rev A network, the result was a Web experience that's better than most phones, but a big step behind the leaders at Apple and Nokia.
My Instinct itself was also a bit buggy. The weather app crashed the phone once, I had trouble with some UI elements in the Web browser, and both the Media Manager software and the Mobile Sync software crashed a couple of times on my Vista PC. All of these issues could, and must, be fixed with software updates.
The Samsung Instinct is taking a run straight at the iPhone, but it's not quite an iPhone. It offers some features the iPhone doesn't, and it makes better phone calls than the original iPhone, but it doesn't quite match the iPhone's stellar design or near-perfect ease-of-use. Sprint users who want to focus on PIM and e-mail should go with the
Sprint will start selling the Instinct on June 20.
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 20 minutes
Video
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