Samsung Instinct – First Impression
jewel September 22nd, 2008
A couple days ago I decided to upgrade my phone. For the past year I have been using a Sanyo Katana DLX. It was ok, for a phone, but nothing special really. I decided I wanted to upgrade to a more “gagety” phone. The Instinct came out a couple months ago and I’ve had my eye one it. Looked pretty cool and I do like the idea of a touch screen. Is it the iPhone killer that was hoped for? Probably not. It does have a similar interface, it’s a bit smaller (which in my mind is a good thing), it does some things better and probably other things not as well. The worst thing about the iPhone is that it’s only on the AT&T network. I wasn’t about to switch to AT&T just to get an iPhone, so the Instinct is, for me, the next best thing.
Well, I’ve had my new Instinct for 3 days now and so far I love it. The interface is really cool, it is all touch screen. You get a QWERTY keyboard that comes up on the touch screen whenever you click a field that requires input – and I like the Instinct’s keyboard better than the iPhone’s. Also, like the iPhone, the web on the Instinct looks like the web. The browser navigaton isn’t as cool as the iPhone’s, but you do get the images and layout and zoom in and scroll around the page and such.
I also really like the Navigation feature. It talks to you and tells you where to go and how to get there as well as shows you on a 3D style map. I’m told that while the iPhone also has Navigation, it doesn’t actually tell you the directions, only shows you. If that is the case, I’d say the Instinct wins there, too. It also comes with an extra battery, which is pretty cool, so even though the battery isn’t as long lived as the iPhone, the extra one does compensate for that and it comes with a charging case as well so the extra battery can always be charging while you’re using the phone. Oh and it’s stereo bluetooth too (I would imagine the iPhone is as well, but I don’t know), so I can listen to my tunes via bluetooth.
There are also a few things I’d like to see improved upon. For instance, I’d like the option to show my wallpaper all the time and just bring up the applications when I wanted to with the hot keys. Or, an option to get rid of the “Favorites” screen. Also, not everything has been intuitive, like actually answering a call took a couple of incoming calls for me to figure out. Maybe, just maybe, I should read the manual. I don’t usually do that. Also, the web browser could use a bit of improvement. Navigating a web page is much cooler on the iPhone. I don’t normally do a lot of web surfing on my phone anyway, but hopefully Samsung will improve it with the next generation phone.
All in all, I’m impressed with the Instinct. Hopefully I’ll continue to be.
I hear the BlackJack’s not bad. I’m not too crazy about phones in general (semaphore all the way!), but I hate the inflexibility of the operating systems more than anything. You can’t move/get rid of/ hide/add/destroy with a microwave some of the features they make native on an otherwise perfectly good phone that in the end prove to be nothing but distractions.
I hear that. Interestingly, I’m one of those people that hates talking on the phone. But I have come to like having phones that do other stuff (like email, web, navigation) so even if I don’t often actually talk to people on my phone, I still get plenty of use out of it.
Nice geeky new phone, and glad you didn’t get lured to an Apple. We replaced our handsets with LG ENV2′s earlier this year. Better than what we had before, but the browser is HTML only, so the web looks a little weird. Facebook and Flickr work after a fashion, but it doesn’t look as smooth as I had hoped. So what ring-tone have you set yourself up with?
I’m still configuring ringers. In fact, I just started having trouble with Sprint’s OnDemand service. I’m certain it’s not the phone because I would occasionally have the issue with my old phone as well. Normally rebooting the phone did the trick, but not this time. I’ve rebooted, taken the battery out, and even just tried a hard reset… that was desperation and it was wasted. So, now I am reconfiguring my phone and will stop by a Sprint store tomorrow and see if they can fix it or tell me what the problem is. Preferably fix it.
Even used the GPS feature this past weekend getting to and from NC. Worked pretty well. There was only a couple small hiccups.
Yep, it wasn’t the phone. The OnDemand stuff started working again last night. Silly network. And I still love this phone!