A quick review of the Samsung Instinct, while I am holding one in my hand. Thanks to my dear friend Anya for the hookup.
IM & Email forces me to use Windows Live for an account, then asks me to subscribe for $5 a month. No, thanks.
Messaging is both SMS and MMS. Though if you forget to select it at the beginning, you might just have to retype your message when you decide to also send a picture. Overall, pretty intuitive to use, except for that one thing. Why should I need to make that decision in advance?
The calculator I would actually say is pretty useful. No scientific mode, but it has a unit converter and a tip calculator. The simple UI design is pretty good as well.
Power saving mode essentially locks you out of many things1. I guess phone calls are OK, and that half makes sense. Unless, say, you want to find out how to get to a hotel after a long flight, in a strange city, and would rather spend the remaining power on that. Oh well. This means that I cannot test many other things from now on.
A few overall design considerations:
Many text entry fields will automatically switch you to landscape mode, which was rather confusing at first. In the browser, the text input screen covers the page, so a few times I was left wondering just what the hell I was typing into.
Speaking of the browser, it is laggy and rather non-standards compliant. At least, it does not render PNGs with an alpha layer, like this blog’s header banner. The CSS is also whacked. Scrolling is a bit of a pain due to, again, the lagginess. From what I can tell, it also forces you in landscape mode, which may be an issue for some Finally, there is no visual feedback once you click a link: you see something was clicked, but are free to place bets as to what that was until the page has finished loading.
There are a few other things on here. A crappy music player with an interface that I found simply not appealing in any way, a live TV application, a few demos and a bunch of ‘fake’ applications - just links to webpages, like YouTube or Facebook (done in a manner similar to the 1.1.4 iPhone ‘applications’).
The other things on the phone I cannot really test right now because the phone is low on battery. While I do not rememer how full it was when I got here, it was certainly on green; now, it is flashing red, after about an hour of playing with the device.
By far, the one item I had the most difficulty with was the keyboard. Now, not because I have an iPhone and I am used to this one. Rather, the pressure required to press a button is, I would say, considerable. You also must separate touches, otherwise a lot of keys will be missed. There is some minor lag with that as well, though not a show-stopper. It can be better and I am sure it will be, come a software update or two. If this would be your first phone with a touch keyboard, you might get used to it. That depends on if you are coming from a Blackberry or a more traditional 12-button keypad, I guess. The drawing recognition has not impressed me much, mainly because it is a rather slow method of input. It might be useful for typing in the car or something, as long as the detection is sufficiently accurate (which I cannot quite say it is yet).
Other minor things include list scrolling (through, say, settings) because things are easily clicked by accident; and the back button for appliations that is at the bottom, still touch, but somehow feels out of the picture. It tends to be covered by your hand a lot of times, so it may not be readily obvious where to find it. I will put this to the fact that I am more used to the iPhone’s way of doing things, so maybe it is more of an acquired taste.
This is a quick review, in no way comprehensive or thorough. Just a guy playing with a gadget and noticing things. I may have missed some settings that would have made things easier and I stated that I was not able to test everything. So, if you are considering buying one, play with it on your own. If the price point I am hearing is correct though ($150) than I really do not know why you would opt for this versus an iPhone. Not sure what the situation is about applications and the likes on the Instinct, though the pages that it took me to (via the built-in Applications application) did not seem to have anything at this time2. Either way, in the head-to-head, Apple’s device wins; on it’s own, the Instinct is not all bad, though it will benefit from a bit of extra work.
