Samsung Instinct Review

Interface:

Samsung and Sprint wiped the slate clean to create a new user interface for the Instinct, and the results are overwhelmingly positive. Never has a Sprint phone had such an intuitive UI. With a dynamic interface that the touchscreen affords, the Instinct is a breeze to navigate. Icons are large, attractive and most importantly relevant.

The interface consists of four tabs- Favs, Main, Fun and Web- which are static at the bottom of the screen. Favs allows the user to set up to 12 shortcuts to applications, bookmarks, music, TV channels and even a frequently messaged contact. To reorder favorites the user can simply hold and drag the item to where they want it.

Main offers nine submenus; Email, Messaging, Voicemail, Navigation, Calculator, Notes, Calendar, Clock and Settings. Fun is where you find music, TV, radio, games and pictures. Lastly, you’ll find the browser, Live Search and weather, news, sports and more under the Web tab. The layout is incredibly simple, and incredibly intuitive to use. At any time the user can hit the Home key and be returned to the Favs tab.

The animations are slick as well. For instance, if you are in the Fun tab and click Web the application panels all slide in on their own from the right (since Web is right of Fun) and neatly arrange themselves. If you click the Main tab, which is left of Fun, they slide in from the left. You can scroll through menus with a flick of the finger, and when you get to the bottom or top of a list the phone vibrates and the panes move like a wave, separating in the corresponding direction only to come quickly back together. It’s quite clear that a lot went into the design of the interface.

It’s no perfect, however, and it’s no OS X. First, and foremost, it’s almost too simple. It’s cool, but lacks the wow factor that the iPhone has. There is no real home screen, so the user can’t personalize the device with wallpapers other than the standby screen when the device is locked. And that standby screen needs to have a slide to unlock feature, none of this holding down the lock button for two seconds. The icons are good looking, but are a bit too cartoonish and the grey interface is drab, with no other options. In this day of finger flicking, it would make sense to be able to flick between tabs, instead of just tapping. While these are admittedly minor gripes, mostly cosmetic and non-functional, a phone of this caliber needs to wow the user and get them excited about using it. The Instinct just doesn’t do that, and it’s a shame because it’s a really good interface.

Luckily this UI won’t be exclusive to the Instinct. Sprint plans to release other phones running it, and they have released an SDK for it. It’s based off a BREW/Java platform, so hopefully users will create skins and as the UI evolves with new elements it will also become more aesthetically pleasing.


Phonebook:

The phone interface has been completely reworked as well. Again, there are four tabs across the bottom: Speed Dial, Contacts, History and Dialer. Users can easily assign speed dials by touching “Tap to add,” then selecting them from the contact list. From the Speed Dial tab they can simply touch the user to call them directly, or hit the arrow key for contact details.

On the details screen the user will see the picture id (or placeholder silhouette) at the top and the contact’s details down below. The user can tap on a number to call it, or the speech bubble next to it to send a text message. Tapping the email initiates an email. If you have the user’s address stored you can initiate a navigation session with the press of a button. You can also view the history for that contact, which holds all of your text messages and call logs. Everything is great, to be quite honest.

The contacts tab of course lists your contacts, in this case alphabetically. There is no first name/last name field so it sorts by however you have them named. At the top is a + which is used to add a new contact. Along the right is a little half circle that you can drag to quickly scroll though them; as you grab it a giant A appears on the screen and you can run through the alphabet. There is no contact search feature, an omission in our opinion.



The History tab brings up your call history, and Dialer is the 12 key dialpad. At the top of the Dialer screen is a giant green talk button that you press to initiate a call. The in-call screen is very useful. The top shows the contact name, phone number and call duration. Below that is the large picture ID area. In the middle is a large End Call slider. There is a Mute button and Speakerphone slider below that and on the bottom is Add Call, Contacts and Dialer buttons. We have to admit, the first time we were in a call the End Call slider, instead of an actual press-able button, confused us. It’s a slick feature, but they may have been trying too hard with that one. None the less, it’s a nice looking and very functional call screen.

Mobile Sync, which we first told you about in our Sanyo PRO-700 review will let you manage your contacts online. The web tool will import Outlook contacts, though it does not actually sync with Outlook like a Windows Mobile phone would. It’s still a great, free tool offered by sprint.



Visual Voicemail:

The Instinct brings Visual Voicemail to Sprint for the first time.  It's a very cool feature, and works more like an application than a voicemail system.  When the voicemail notification comes through it displays the sender's number (or name, if they are in your contact list,) or you can go to the Voicemail option from the Main tab.  All voicemails in your inbox will be shown with the caller's name or number, simply tap on the voicemail you want to listen to and a player comes up.  The user can pause, fast forward and rewind the message, lock it or choose to forward or reply to it.  You can also call the user back or send them a text message from this screen.  It does use a new voicemail system however, so old codes such as 11-xxx-xxx-xxxx to backdoor a user or pressing 1 to skip the greeting does not work.  It's a nifty program, and hopefully we'll see it on more phones in the near future.



Organizer:

The Instinct’s calendar is unfortunately similar to dumphone calendars, rather than smartphones. It is relatively basic, allowing you to add appointments and set a reminder alarm up to one hour before. You can set it to recur daily, weekly, monthly or yearly as well as select days of the week for it to occur. It does not, however, sync with Outlook or iCal and therefore is generally useless.

It does have a basic notes program, which simply allows you to store notes and nothing else. The calculator can function as a standard calculator, tip calculator or unit converter. The alarm clock will let you set up to 10 alarms. They can be one time use alarms, or can be set to repeat daily, Monday-Friday or Saturday and Sunday. You can set the snooze interval to 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes. Other clock features include a world clock, stopwatch and countdown timer.

The Instinct loses major ground to the iPhone in its PIM functionality. Instead of taking it to the next level, it simply offers the basics you’d find on any run of the mill phone. This is an unfortunate move, and we feel if the Instinct offered better PIM support, such as Outlook sync, it would be a much better phone.



There is only 32MB of internal memory available, a paltry number to be sure. However, the UI runs perfectly smoothly with it and user memory is expandable up to 8GB via microSD. It ships with a 2GB card, giving most users plenty of memory to carry a small music collection on. As it is microSDHC compliant, it is likely that 16 and 32GB cards will work as they become available.