Full Review - Testing and Use
Phone, Messaging, Voicemail Multimedia Camera/Camcorder Web/Email
The Instinct's call quality on both ends is very good, with clear audio and no dropouts when both parties talk simultaneously. Reception in and around New York City is far from perfect, but we didn't hit many dead spots. We love the thumb tab in Contacts that lets you power scroll through the list.
Texting is a breeze, thanks to the excellent virtual keyboard, and the SMS app supports threaded messaging so you can see entire conversations instead of just individual messages.
Visual Voicemail is one of the Instinct's highlights, giving you precise control over voice messages. You can scroll, pause, and delete messages easily, and you can send voice messages directly to phone numbers or email addresses -- though ours often took hours to come through.
The on-board music player looks and works great, and it supports AAC, AAC+, WMA, and MP3 files. It also reads MIDI (a musical instrument data file) and QCP (a voice memo format). Music sounds good through the included earbuds, and the headphone output had no problem handling our Sennheiser HD280 Pro reference headphones.
The Instinct's microSD card slot is compatible with high-capacity cards, which currently max out at 8GB, and a 2GB card is included in the package. The phone also has 32MB of internal memory.
We're not very impressed with the Sprint Music Store's interface, though we do like the ability to download songs over Sprint's cellular network; the iPhone's WiFi iTunes Store requires a wireless network.
On-demand videos from sources like Fox and CNN look acceptable, but live TV is problematic even in good service areas. It's glitchy and pixilated, and the screen often freezes for a few seconds -- not nearly as stable as the LG Voyager's Verizon-based mobile TV.
The phone has an Internet radio app with lots of preset stations, though the app itself is confusing and could use some sprucing up. It gives you access to plenty of free content, as well as paid subscriptions to services like Sirius.
The camera app is accessible via the Camera button, but only if you're in the phone's main menu. Our test still images (1600 x 1200 pixels) looked okay on the phone, but when we transferred them to our laptop, we could see how grainy and soft the pictures were. Colors were fairly accurate, and the exposure wasn't bad though a bit dark.
We captured a 2-minute video (you can record until the memory card is full), and the 320 x 240-pixel MPEG-4 movie looked good, though fast action blurred easily, and movies are a bit jumpy at 15 frames per second. Sadly, the Instinct does not support video messaging (MMS).
We had no trouble emailing pictures right after taking them, but we were unable to get the Web uploader (which works with online services like Photobucket) to work. Also, when we emailed our pics to ourselves, Sprint's photo sharing service wouldn't let us access the full-res version of the images. We ended up transferring the photos to our MacBook Pro via Bluetooth.
Image Courtesy of Samsung
The on-board Teleca Web browser supports WAP 2.0, HTML, XHTML, WML, and WMLS, but it lacks Flash or Ajax support. Sites like CNN (optimized for mobile) loaded very quickly, though we often had to tap repeatedly on text-entry fields for site logins to get the virtual keyboard to come up. We like that you can choose between desktop and mobile browser profiles, but it's annoying not to be able to view pages in portrait mode instead of only landscape.
The email client is very good, with multi-message deletion, searchable contacts, and attachment support. It's a snap to set up with AOL, AIM Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo (POP3) accounts, though we often had to check mail manually. Unfortunately, the email client won't show you subfolders within your Inbox, which certainly caused us grief with our well-organized Yahoo account.
We were able to hook it up to a corporate Microsoft Exchange server, though it required a little help from IT support staff, and the Sprint email client isn't nearly as compatible as Windows Mobile versions of Outlook. We got far better results using Outlook Web Access via the Web browser.
Bluetooth, GPS
We tested the Instinct with our Plantronics Discovery 925 mono headset and our Etymotic ety8 stereo headset; both paired easily and the Bluetooth audio came through clearly. The robustness of the Bluetooth signal outshone our Samsung SCH-u740 and was on a par with that of our Nokia N95. Interestingly, we could not get streamed audio (music or from a video) to work over Bluetooth.
The GPS uses Sprint Navigation, which is powered by TeleNav. The GPS had no trouble locating us in New York City; in Brooklyn, it even found us indoors, though we were near a window.
During our testing, some of the GPS-dependent apps for local info like movie times and weather seemed to have trouble grabbing data. We reset the phone, and eventually the services came online, though we still got some spotty results.
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by Jennifer on November 10, 2008:
“My husband and I each got an instinct and they are awful! They constantly freeze and say out of range and the video is awful. I should have gotten a blackberry, but I was told this was way better, they were wrong.” More...