The phone tab gives us quick access to many of the multimedia functions of the Instinct. Music, Sprint TV and Radio and Camera as well as Games are available here.
The music is simply the music store but the new scheme for the Sprint Samsung Instinct. Unfortunately, we did have some problems with ID three tags as I loaded music. Most of the times it didn’t read the upper mark, a few times it didn’t read the ID three tags and there even was an album that it didn’t recognized that have been loaded at all.
We’re not sure why it has this problem and we haven’t really had this issue with the Sprint Music Store in the past. When it’s working properly, the — is displayed very nicely on the large screen. You have shuffle and repeat options which can be taken off by tapping on the screen.
It’s very simple and straightforward and does not have a lot of options. However, it keeps the job done and the Store and Search tabs allow the user to download music over the air. The TV gets an overhaul as well. As we flip it over here, we’ll see the channel guide load. It does take a second to boot some of these applications at times. However, they do appear to run in the background and normally the second time that you load them, it goes much quicker.
Here, we have the music or the channel guide or we have all the different channels available. We can scroll up and down to see what’s available. If we go back to the main screen then go to my videos tab where we can see side loaded videos.
The player itself is fairly good looking. However, the video quality isn’t the greatest on you know the screen is big. Similar to the iPhone, you can tap the screen to hide their controls.
The Instinct definitely is a mark as far as multimedia goes. It has a capability but lacks speed and power as found on the iPhone. The camera is another example and there are actually no options of the camera other than it just take a picture or send it.
The photo album is kind of nice. We’ll put the phone around here again. You have two viewing options. One is just your standard grid or you can go into a cover flow as version. We can drag through the items. You just tap on them and it will move the full screen mode.
Since this is involving you, I hope these issues will be fixed in the past. But for now, the Instinct has some catching up to do with the iPhone in terms of multimedia. The final tab is web where we find the browser, live search, weather news, sports, movies and other options.
We’ve seen a live search before and we’ll take to look at the web here in a second. Weather, News, Sports and the others, seem they basically just be broken down in components of the pocket express around them in application we’ve seen on the past Sprint phones.
They are nice and simple whether for instance allows us to set up the time locations where we can get an overview and detailed forecast. In Sports, you can get your sports scores and sports news and so on and so forth with the other applications.
It’s very nice to have this right at the touch of a finger. It works extremely well. This is very simple and we’re a fan of it. The browsers are important part of any multimedia phone and unfortunately the Instinct falls a bit short here.
However, it’s not as bad as a lot of user comments are making it out to be and all in all the browsing experience is pretty decent. Here, we have Phone Arena loaded in the Overview mode. You can see this little blue box here that I can drag around the page. Once I release it, it will zoom in on that area.
We can then from that place just drag the page and move around if we want it too or we can go back in the Overview mode and scroll in on another area. There’s three zoom options, half zoom, 1X zoom and 2X zoom.
We can tap a little I icon down here and we get the browser address bar as well as some other options such as your homepage, search and your bookmarks. The Instinct browser is definitely very usable. It’s not the greatest browser in the world. However, it taps most of the browsers out there including Pocket Internet Explorer.
One thing that we won’t be able to show you here because of the dark area is the automatic pan feature. If you hold the camera button and move the phone up and down, it will pan and scroll the page in the direction you’re moving the phone. It’s more of a novelty feature, nothing that you would really use all that much but it is kind of cool nonetheless.
If you press the Phone button down here, we’ll be taken to the phone application. Here it takes us to the speed dial where we can add contacts to the lists, simply tap them and—or if you click to the right on them, you’ll see their contact information. Here, if we have an address, we can directly go through Sprint navigation or we can send them a text message.
The next tab over is your full contact list. On the right side, you have a little slider when you push it, the upper back comes up and as you scroll you can quickly jump through your contacts. History shows you call history and finally the Dialer is your dialer to call people.
It’s all very straightforward, the large talk book button makes it easy to call people and overall the phone experience is very good. We like the Instinct very much although I will be the first to admit that it’s not an iPhone. However, there are many people out there who either don’t want to be on AT&T or for other reasons can’t be on AT&T. And in that case, the Instinct gets our vote.
At $129.00, it’s a steel for everything that it offers. The touchscreen responsiveness is excellent. The QWERTY is simply the best touch screen QWERTY we have ever used and there’s a ton of features packed into the phone.
Well, Samsung will probably never top Apple in their touchscreen phones nor anyone else for that matter, they’ve done a great job creating the best of the rest. The Instinct is a solid value and the phone that we’d recommend to anyone.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services