Samsung Instinct Review

Introduction:

Touchscreen devices are nothing new, in fact they've been in the mobile world for nearly a decade, but there's no denying that the iPhone jumpstarted their popularity. In the last year there have been several attempts to replicate the iPhone experience, names like Voyager and Vu come to mind, but in reality no one has come close. Part of Apple’s success lies in their ground-up approach, a fact that went largely overlooked by competitors. Samsung and Sprint took note. Nearly a year to the day after the iPhone’s release the Instinct is here, and it is the first touchscreen device that can truly go toe-to-toe with the iPhone.

In fact, on paper the Instinct beats even the iPhone 3G. Its EVDO Rev. A data will work in more places than the iPhone 3G’s HSDPA due to Sprint’s much larger and more mature 3G network. The Instinct’s 2 megapixel camera is capable of video recording and MMS (or Sprint’s variant.) Finally, it features not only voice recognition but Speech-to-Action and it also has stereo Bluetooth. Other features include a 3.2” display, 3.5mm headset jack, GPS and microSD expansion. Paper is just that, though, and the Instinct will have to live up to its hype in the real world before being crowned.

Included in the box you’ll find:

Design:

There’s no denying it, the Instinct and iPhone look similar at a glance. There’s only so much you can do with a touchscreen device though, and Samsung has done well to keep the similarities to a minimum. The pre-release pictures appear to have shown two different Instincts, one with a grey housing and the other with black, both with bright chrome trim. In reality the housing and trim are more of a gunmetal color. The housing is mirrored, making it appear brighter than the still-shiny-but-slightly-dull trim. Coupled with the black soft-touch back, it’s a darker look than the iPhone and gives the Instinct a more business-like appearance. It may or may not be intentional, but the dark mirrored background actually does a good job of hiding the fingerprints. It collects them just as you’d expect, but it doesn’t look as bad when all smudged up as the iPhone or Touch Diamond. In our opinion the soft-touch back gives the Instinct is a better look and feel than the iPhone’s metal backing. We’ll of course reserve final judgment until we see both in person, but from what we’ve seen thus far we’d take the Instinct’s flat black over the shiny black or white plastic on the iPhone 3G.

The Instinct is narrower than the iPhone by a good margin, though it is 2mm taller and undetectably thicker (by 0.2mm.) It’s slightly lighter as well, but neither phone is light. The narrowness gives it a better feel, especially when it’s being used (your thumb is navigating the device.)


You can compare the Samsung Instinct to many other phones, using PhoneArena's Visual Size Compare tool.

Perched at the top of the face is a long, stretched oval speaker. It does double duty as both the earpiece and music/ringer/speakerphone speaker. For how small it is and being mono, the sound is surprisingly good. Above and below the display sit the Samsung and Sprint logos, both in a silver finish to contrast the dark gunmetal. Below the Sprint logo are the three touch sensitive navigation keys, Back, Home and Phone. When in use they light up bright white, and like the screen they offer haptic feedback when pressed.


The display itself is 3.2” and has a resolution of 240x432 pixels with 262k colors. Samsung is known for making top quality LCD panels, and the Instinct is no exception, but unfortunately it is not as nice as the 320x480, 16M color display of the iPhone. It does seem to wash out a bit in direct sunlight, but it is still plenty readable.

The panel uses resistive touchscreen technology, meaning that it can be used with a stylus or while wearing a glove in addition to your bare fingers. The iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen cannot, but it is smoother to use partly because of multi-touch. A big advantage Samsung has over Apple is haptic feedback. Every time you touch the screen your press is confirmed with a slight vibration, which is particularly useful when typing. This feature can be turned off, but we wouldn’t want to.

The display is plenty responsive, and even when we tried to confuse it to invoke lag it kept up. There is a stop watch app, and we were able to stop the timer after just 0.05s, which is damn responsive. When typing the letter you press changes colors; there were times when that animation fell behind our typing speed but it didn’t actually miss a key press. We were very impressed, and Samsung passed a big hurdle with its performance.

On the left side of the Instinct is the volume rocker in the middle and covered charging/data port up top. It is a proprietary Samsung port, the same one found in the М520, and we really wish they would move to microUSB as they have committed to do. The right side has a microSD slot opposite the charging port, the Speech-to-Action button in the middle and Camera button down below. The rocker and S2A button are shiny black, where the camera button is bright silver, and all of them offer plenty of travel and positive feedback. At the top is the silver lock button and non-recessed 3.5mm headphone jack. The back is extremely plain, with only an embossed Samsung logo in the middle and the silver camera in the top left.


Samsung are master craftsmen, and even their low-end phones have a high-quality feel to them. It’s no surprise that the Instinct would be their best design so far, both aesthetically and in terms of build quality. The thing is simply rock solid. We’ve never felt comfortable holding the iPhone or similarly sized devices, and the Instinct is far from perfect, but it’s better that its predecessors. The narrowness plays a big factor in this, even if the screen is a bit smaller for it. The edges are smooth, the soft touch finish is reassuringly grippy and the lines clean as can be. The design isn’t original (nor is Apple’s,) but it is uniquely Samsung.

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, Historyand 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 firsttime.  It's a very cool feature, andworks more like an application than a voicemail system.  When the voicemail notification comes throughit displays the sender's number (or name, if they are in your contact list,) or you can go to the Voicemail optionfrom the Main tab.  All voicemails inyour inbox will be shown with the caller's name or number, simply tap on thevoicemail you want to listen to and a player comes up.  The user can pause, fast forward and rewindthe message, lock it or choose to forward or reply to it.  You can also call the user back or send thema text message from this screen.  It does use a newvoicemail system however, so old codes such as 11-xxx-xxx-xxxx to backdoor auser or pressing 1 to skip the greeting does not work.  It's a nifty program, and hopefully we'll seeit 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.

Messaging:

Ah, here’s where the Instinct, like every touchscreen device before it, will falter.  Right?  Wrong.  The Instinct’s onscreen QWERTY is the best we’ve used, and it’s not really even close.  In landscape orientation the Instinct is very comfortable to use and we were typing quickly right out of the box.  It kept up with us and was accurate as can be.  When you press a key it turns blue and the phone gives you haptic feedback, and as we got faster the animations sometimes couldn’t keep up, but the presses were still registered nonetheless and the message was correct.  Honestly, we were quite surprised since we are a) not a fan of touchscreen QWERTYs and b) not a fan of QWERTYs in general.  Our only complaint with the QWERTY keyboard is the backspace key placement, which is on the very top next to the orientation toggle and keyboard hide key.  About 10% of the time we’d hide the keyboard instead of going back, but since there were very few mistakes this really isn’t an issue.

We do have a major gripe with the portrait mode keypad however.  In one of the stupider design moves in recent history Samsung has decided to go with a full keyboard laid out alphabetically.  There is no excuse for this not being a T9 keypad like you find on the Touch Diamond or Glyde.   This layout makes one -handed typing basically out of the question, and Samsung needs to release an update for this yesterday to fix this issue.  There is also handwriting recognition in portrait mode, though we doubt many people will use it.

Text messages are threaded, finally.  We’ve seen this on Palm, the iPhone and Windows Mobile 6.1 and it’s about time it came to a non-smartphone.  Unfortunately we don’t see this carrying over into the rest of the dumphone lineup (though it’s unfair to call the Instinct a dumbphone, perhaps a slightly-more-intelligent phone is a better term.)  When you open messaging you see a list of contacts you are conversing with, and tapping their name brings up your conversation thread.  You have the option to delete individual or selected messages, as well as the entire conversation.

Email is handled by the Sprint Mobile Email client, which just appears as “Email” in the menu.  Users can check personal email from AOL, AIM, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or other personal POP and IMAP accounts.  It is advertised as push, and does indeed alert you when you have new email, but in our use it took anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes for a message to show up.  It does appear to be using IMAP, which is an upgrade from past versions.  For the everyday user that doesn’t need their email within two seconds of arrival SME is a very capable and easy to use program.  The only oddity is that the user has to go into the settings and choose to be alerted of new emails, for some reason this is not set to on as default.

Sprint recently announced Sprint Mobile Email Work, which will allow users to configure Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes email on the Instinct in addition to their personal email accounts.  It is simply another tab in the email program, entitled Work, and the user can configure their device with their server settings to access both work email and work contacts.  Since the Instinct requires an Everything or Talk/Message/Share plan, the program is free.

The Instinct also supports Sprint’s Picture and Video mail service, basically (though not truly) MMS.  Unlike previous Sprint phones, which capped out at 30s, the Instinct can send Video Mail that is up to 2 minutes in length.  Unfortunately other devices cannot view videos that long, though they will receive the message and be given the option to forward it to email.  There’s nothing special to say about it besides that, other than it’s a feature the iPhone 3G does not support for some unknown reason.

Unfortunately, and questionably, there is no instant messaging client.  Hopefully it’s still being written.

Connectivity and Data:

The Instinct is fast.  EVDO Rev. A and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR make it the fastest device on the market, perfectly complimenting the largest 3G data network in the country.  Sprint’s touting the Instinct as the first consumer device with Rev. A, which isn’t entirely true given QChat launched a few days before the Instinct, but they can probably lay claim to it being the best 3G experience on the market.  Yeah, the iPhone’s getting high-speed data but AT&T’s 3G network is still small and spotty.  The increased speeds, both down and most notably up, makes programs like Sprint Navigation run incredibly smoothly.

The browser is a mixed bag.  It is a full HTML browser, but much like RIM and Palm’s full browsers they fall short of a desktop experience.  It is better than those two, PhoneArena eventually loaded properly, but it seemed to take longer than it should.  It has three zoom steps, ½, 1 and 2x which are accessed sequentially via a side button.  There is also a page overview mode, similar to Opera Mini, which allows the user to drag a box around the webpage and release to zoom in.  Unfortunately flash is not supported, though m.youtube.com is.  It’s not as bad as some are making it out to be, but it could use some improvement.


Browsing is done in landscape mode only.  While the Instinct does not have an accelerometer, the user can hold the camera button while surfing and the phone will move the page as you tilt the device.  It’s a cool feature, just not all that useful.  It also needs some topographical relief as a reference point, so something like a carpet or a dark room in effect nullifies this feature.  One thing we did like is the keyboard changes when in the web browser.  On the main keyboard screen www. and .com replace the space bar, and if you switch to number/symbol mode most common web address beginnings and endings have a shortcut, including https://, mail., .co.uk and .mobi.  Kudos to Samsung for being so comprehensive.
The phone does run Java apps, so there’s hope for Opera Mini, but currently it does not work since the Instinct has no soft keys.  The addition of Opera Mini would greatly increase the Instinct’s browsing capabilities.

The Instinct features Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and supports the following profiles: HSP, HFP 1.5, DUN, OPP, FTP, PBA, A2DP, AVRC.  A2DP, or stereo Bluetooth, is another major advantage the Instinct has over the iPhone.  Paring is easy; it will attempt to auto pair with other Bluetooth devices using common passwords and in general it worked.

Camera:

Camera performance was underwhelming, which unfortunately is a growing trend with Samsung in the US. It is a 2 megapixel camera, but is no autofocus and in fact there are not even any options. Color representation was pretty good, but edges were soft and pictures turned out grainy to the point of being pixilated. Results were better under natural lighting conditions, but still far from what we’d determine as good. It records video as well, but the only option you have here is to keep the videos under two minutes so they could be uploaded, or to record until you run out of memory. Samsung really dropped the ball here, and we are pretty shocked to see no image controls.

The picture album is nifty, though again not on par with competitors. Images can be viewed either in a standard grid, or in a cover flow style. Tapping the image zooms in and out, and in full screen mode you can flick back and forth to change pictures. Images look good on the high resolution display, and when setting a background image you can rotate, zoom and center the image to your liking. Unfortunately, as we said earlier, you only see the wallpaper when the phone comes out of sleep and is waiting to be unlocked.






Multimedia:

The Instinct has the potential to be a multimedia powerhouse, featuring OTA music downloads, live TV and streaming radio. On the music side it supports MP3, AAC, AAC+ and WMA files, while the video player handles the H.264 and MPEG4 codecs.

Audio quality was good, and the sound quality was on par with our iPod. With its 3.5mm headset jack the user is free to use whatever headphones they like. Sound was surprisingly good out of the speaker as well. A small set of aftermarket speakers would no doubt be bigger, but it does a good job with what it has.

Music playback is handled by the Sprint Music Store. It’s gotten a redesign for the Instinct, but functionality remains the same. It’s fairly basic, with only shuffle and repeat options, but easy to use. The store portion lends itself to finger-friendliness and searching for music is simple. The player displays the song information on the top, with the album art dominating most of the display. There is a time bar towards the bottom and previous track, play/pause and next track controls below it.


Unfortunately it still has issues with ID3 tags at times, and for some reason it seems to be worse this time around. We side-loaded five or six albums to test and it read the song information on all but one, though it did not read the artwork on any of them. A bigger issue we had was that it completely didn’t recognize a certain album we loaded. The files were in mp3 format, properly tagged with embedded album art but the player just didn’t see it at all. We have even used this album with the Sprint Music Store in past reviews, so something is definitely amiss.

The Sprint TV application also looks different on the Instinct, and handles side-loaded videos as well. In TV mode it has a sidebar to the left, and the channel listings on the right. Unfortunately the mediocre quality is only exaggerated on the Instinct’s high resolution screen. Side-loaded videos didn’t look much better unfortunately, and the Instinct is well behind the iPhone In this regard.


Sprint Radio is a separate application than TV, but has a similar layout. Like the TV service, it offers content that is live, made for mobile or on-demand. An added feature of Sprint radio is that there are hundreds of local channels available from across the country.



Software:

Since it is built on a Java platform, the Instinct can run many Java applications. However, due to its unique no soft key layout and touchscreen display, most current apps won’t work. We were able to load Opera Mini, but then couldn’t do anything with it and Google wouldn’t even let us download Google Maps since it didn’t know what phone we had. Since this is a new phone and new platform this is to be expected, but we hope developers start working on applications sooner rather than later.


The Instinct comes pre-loaded with a few very nice programs. We’ve seen Live Search on other phones, as well as Sprint Navigation, but for the first time the two can talk to each other. Live Search’s voice recognition capability means you can search for businesses and get local results based on your GPS location. A simple tap and you can start a navigation session to guide you there. Navigation on the large display looks beautiful. We’ve often though that Sprint Navigation was missing voice prompts, and while Live Search can’t look up specific addresses by voice it’s still very handy.

The Instinct’s Speech-to-Action is powered by VoiceSignal’s Vsuite. VoiceSignal has long been one of our favorite programs, and it seems that the Instinct is running an updated version. It seems to work better, and it picks up the wrong command (for example, “Jane Doe Mobile 2” instead of just “Jane Doe Mobile”) it will tell you that the number doesn’t exist and ask if you’d like to call a different Jane Doe number. In the past it would just let you know that no number existed and then time out. You can actually launch Live Search with it, meaning that you can pretty much start a navigation session completely with your voice.

Performance:

We had absolutely no reception problems with the Instinct, though the bars do jump wildly. We could go from 1 bar to full coverage and back down to 1 without even moving, but call quality remained excellent and we never dropped a call. Bars should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, as they are not a true indicator of signal strength. Callers said we sounded as good as we did on the Touch Diamond, which was the best ever. They even said we sounded “pretty good” over Bluetooth, which is a rare compliment. On our end they sounded great as well, voice quality was rich and volume was fine even in a moving car with the windows down.

Battery life, however, was not so stellar. It is rated at an incredibly high 5.75 hours of talk time, but we were only able to manage a bit over 3.5 hours. Just to make sure, we ran the test with both included batteries, but got talk times of 3h32m and 3h41m. For such a feature-rich CDMA phone those numbers are still on the high end, and we were pretty skeptical of the 5.75 hour claim to begin with.

Conclusion:

We came away quite impressed with the Instinct. The touchscreen is responsive, call quality top notch and multimedia suite expansive. Some of the features need more refinement, such as the portrait keypad and music player, but overall Sprint and Samsung should be commended for their ground-up approach to the phone. We have high hopes for both the UI and the forward thinking that went into it.

So, is it worthy of a crown? Absolutely, just not the one it aimed for. It’s a commendable adversary to the iPhone, and indeed outperforms it in many areas, but in the end the Instinct lacks the slickness and wow factor that the iPhone has. We’d be happy to crown it “Best of the Rest” though, and at just $130 see no reason why Sprint users- or anyone who doesn’t want AT&T but wants a feature packed touchscreen phone- wouldn’t go out and buy one today.