Samsung Instinct s30 User Reviews

Phone geek posted on 13 Apr 2011, 10:57

10

Sooooo Awsome

Phone geek has owned it for less than month before publishing this review

This phone is great it has a good camera and is a long battery life phone could not be any better. It is great for kids and teens .The software and touch screen text works good.I had no Idea it could work like this.I bought it at a best buy mobile on 280.The sevice is great and I an do most of anything.i ordered black and bought a jelly pad case.

ps sprint is waaay better thatn at&t doucha

Build quality 10/10

Reception 10/10

Call quality 10/10

Internet 10/10

Multimedia 10/10

Camera 10/10

UI speed 10/10

Everyday usage 10/10

Text input 10/10

Display 10/10

Battery 10/10

Pros

• awsome opera works great

Cons

John Johnson1 posted on 20 Mar 2010, 14:31

8.3

Alrite

Its a good phone and it has alot of cool features with the live search and the GPS works great. The battery life isnt good and its always freezes on the web. I had this phone for about 2 months now I had to swap it out for my old phone which was a Sanyo 8400 that I liked alot. But  Samsung usuallly makes good phones and I heard the the regulary Instinct wasnt that good, so I thought that the s30 might be different.

Design 8/10

Features 10/10

Performance 7/10

Pros

• Features and nice, sleek

Cons

• Battery could be battery
• Freezes alot

douchka posted on 12 Mar 2010, 10:38

3

um hum

 Is it me or Phonearena always rates Sprint phones above 8, and any other carrier 8 or below? Same way cnet.com always rates ATT's phones way above average and any other carrier phone average or below? Must have something to do with advertising. I mean of of the advertisement on here are sprint ones...Just saying

Design 3/10

Features 3/10

Performance 3/10

reviewer posted on 04 Jan 2010, 15:54

4

do not buy

All i can tell you is not to buy this phone. it looks good but the software is horrible. it shuts down on its own too many times and i had to swap it for the hero
 

Design 7/10

Features 4/10

Performance 1/10

Pros

• thin
• touch sensitive buttons
• video camera

Cons

• everything and always freezes!!!!!

InstinctDemon posted on 12 Nov 2009, 13:43

8.7

Great Phone

I got my Instinct S30 back in July.  I am very satisfied with this phone. 
First the video quality was a bit pixilated, but found a way to increase the bandwidth, so problem resolved.
Opera Is a good web browser.
One thing I noticed is that when taking pictures especially if you take mulitple pics quickly the images seem to drop, but doing the same thing it makes them reappear, quirky but not a major issue. 
I know its only a phone but people have complimented me on this phone especially since they have other Samsung touchscreens, the camera is only 2.0 megapixel but that's all you need if you need to post on facebook or myspace.
I love the Sprint Naviagtion with the Nuance voice command; this feature rocks, the Visual Voicemail is also a plus!
Easy Navigation on the text keyboard with spellcheck is great, tethered messages.
No real complaints other than the battery life could be better, but if you're web, looking at videos, and texting I guess it would suck up the battery.

Design 9/10

Features 9/10

Performance 8/10

Pros

• *Visual VoiceMail
• *GPS
• *Music Organizer
• *Stylish
• *Text Keyboard

Cons

• *Battery Could be better
• *Photos tend to drop when clicking the camera too much but reappears when doing the same.

Shane posted on 03 Aug 2009, 22:29

9.3

Awesome

I love this phone. i am learnig new things about it everyday.
the music play is good.
touchscreen works excelent.
 

Design 10/10

Features 9/10

Performance 9/10

Pros

• Touch Screen
• Loud Speaker
• Bright Beautiful Display
• Apps

Cons

• No voice memo
• Battery Life could be better

Anonymous posted on 11 Jun 2009, 01:21

9.7

Iphone knockout

i purchased my s30 at my local radioshack and it is great opera mini was a big hit and my family has the original instinct so i decided to give this one a try and i absolutely love it i reccommend this to anyone that wants to buy the iphone dont even bother with the iphone this phone is 10 times as good

Design 10/10

Features 10/10

Performance 9/10

Pros

• signal, opera mini, sleek design, color, camera, size, features, texting

Cons

• nothing

vin posted on 03 May 2009, 17:20

8

Samsung Instinct s30 review

As a practical phone, the s30 works well.  Great keyboard, signal(6 bars in my apartment) and battery life. For its features the size and weight are impressive. 
Using the phone to watch streaming TV reminded me of the 200x 200 vidoes of garbage quality appearing 15+ years ago.  Complete with artifacts and 1-2 second freezes in picture.  However, with the microSD card slot you can import your own videos including .hkvs.  I recommend finding out how to re-encode your own .hkvs to fit the phone specifications(240 x 432 @ 15FPS).  The microSD feature is the reason I didn't get an iphone.
No use for or way to remove the NFL and Nascar buttons.  However I can add/remove myspace/facebook/photobucket/youtube/online albums even though I have no use for any of them.  Most people would like the option to remove NFL and Nascar. 
In the games/applications section nothing is free.  Since only the Instinct uses this Operating Systems not many people are jumping to develop software. There's only 15-20 games/applications available with a slim chance of many more being added ever. 
 
 
 

Design 10/10

Features 5/10

Performance 9/10

Pros

• microSD Reader
• headphone out
• well functioning phone

Cons

• No Wifi support
• Limited applications
• Failure OS

Doakie posted on 20 Apr 2009, 12:48

8.3

Best dumbish smartphone I've ever used.

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Opera Mini works great for browsing the Internet. I don't like that they still have the stock browser as the default browser though. If you hit the web button it brings up the old and busted browser. I really like how Opera is optimized to work on this touch screen phone.
Messaging is good, I like the On Screen Keyboard it works great in qwerty mode. But you can also switch it to single hand mode, it formats as an A B C D setup that is 6 boxes wide and 5 boxes tall. The phone has a chat log style history for text messages although it flows backwards. In texting and Sprint Mobile Email its awesome because there is a built in spell checker that lights up incorrect works in red and they turn blue after corrected. Although the spell checker doesn't seem to work in the IM client, standard web browser or Opera Mini. Sprint Mobile email works good, No issues at all connecting to my Gmail. Voice mail is odd, it claims that it can verbally tell you who has left you a message when it arrives.
Navigation seems to have connection problems inside of buildings it gets zero signal to the satellites. Instant Messaging is great, I use ICQ which I can log into using the AOL client. It stays logged in no matter if it loses signal quality. Or it probably auto re-logs once signal quality is back and doesn't tell me. When exited out of the client it will send you a text message saying to check the client if someone had messaged...  

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Opera Mini works great for browsing the Internet. I don't like that they still have the stock browser as the default browser though. If you hit the web button it brings up the old and busted browser. I really like how Opera is optimized to work on this touch screen phone.
Messaging is good, I like the On Screen Keyboard it works great in qwerty mode. But you can also switch it to single hand mode, it formats as an A B C D setup that is 6 boxes wide and 5 boxes tall. The phone has a chat log style history for text messages although it flows backwards. In texting and Sprint Mobile Email its awesome because there is a built in spell checker that lights up incorrect works in red and they turn blue after corrected. Although the spell checker doesn't seem to work in the IM client, standard web browser or Opera Mini. Sprint Mobile email works good, No issues at all connecting to my Gmail. Voice mail is odd, it claims that it can verbally tell you who has left you a message when it arrives.
Navigation seems to have connection problems inside of buildings it gets zero signal to the satellites. Instant Messaging is great, I use ICQ which I can log into using the AOL client. It stays logged in no matter if it loses signal quality. Or it probably auto re-logs once signal quality is back and doesn't tell me. When exited out of the client it will send you a text message saying to check the client if someone had messaged you. A very interesting way to deal with incoming messages.
Other less important apps for me, but are helpful are the calculator that has a tip calculator option or a unit conversion option. I'm sure I'll use the unit converter quite a bit once I remember i have it, but the tip calculator is something anyone who can do math should be able to figure out.
Onto the physical features and UI interaction. Three key things about interacting with this phone, One: the capacitive touch screen on this phone is awesome. Very accurate, I can click little tiny text on this phone and successfully get it about 90% of the time. My G1 frustrates me with that, it is very hard to accurately hit a text link if the text is small on the G1. Two: You'll be using swiping motions on the phone that aren't intuitive. I've never used a phone that did swipes to make actions happen. Case in point, if your phone is key locked and a text comes in the screen lights up and there is a window that states who the text is from, you swipe UP on the screen to View, or DOWN on the screen to Dismiss. Also when you're on a phone call there is a red progress bar that you slide to the right to end the call. Odd but it works once you learn what the hell you're supposed to do. Three: my main complaint with physical interaction with the phone is that the unlock key for the key lock is the power button, you hold it down to unlock. You click the power button once to unlock. Well if you forget that for even a second you might hold that button down to lock the phone and now your phone is shutting down. I did that once, and I'm sure I'll do it again. Four: the vibration that happens when you click on any menu option or link is great, it works great for letting you know if you have missed the button you were trying to click. A slight "vvvvt", goes a long way to easy interaction.
Physical design, very thin, very light, kinda slippery to hold onto. With the smooth metal on the Cobalt model it keeps trying to jump out of my hands. One complaint I have about the physical design is it does not have a standard mini-usb like the G1, or Blackberry. This phone has a proprietary plug that isn't even shared in design with the Samsung Stripe I have.
Battery life seemed to suffer greatly when I put the screen brightness to full. I'm having to run it at 3 out of 5 brightness to make sure my battery will live without worry of it dying prematurely.
Another big complaint I'm going to give my S30, signal quality is garbage. I'm pretty much at 1 or 2 out of 6 bars everywhere I go, I've never seen it hit 5 or 6 out of 6 bars. So obviously with that kind of connection voice calls are suffering. Recording my voice mail message was horrible. So far one time I've lost signal completely when calling voice mail, and one time while browsing the Internet. The mic sucks, highly oversensitive listening to my voice mails greeting the mic is picking up a lot of background noise when I'm sitting in a quiet office. So there really could be two complaints there, Signal quality and crappy microphone.
So with all the issues and praises stated. I really like this phone for a PDA style, almost Smartphone. Although this is a phone, it needs to be a phone first. The signal quality issues and microphone issues might make me return this phone even though I really love it. Great PDA/Smartphone, bad phone.

Design 10/10

Features 10/10

Performance 5/10

Pros

• *Opera Mini
• *Super accurate On Screen Keyboard
• *Spell checker
• *Sprint Mobile Email
• *Great AIM Client

Cons

• *Poor GPS Signal
• *Horrible Cell connection
• *Over sensitive Microphone