Samsung Instinct-M800 Review - Design & Features

Design & Features

Instinct does, in fact, look a little like an iPhone with its full touchscreen and rectangular candybar body.  A little longer, narrower, and thicker than iPhone, Instinct is eye-catching and plain all at once, with its reflective silver faceplate and darker, soft-grip sides and back panel.  Instinct is made of plastic and feels pretty solid and well-balanced in hand.  After a few weeks of using my review unit it’s got one small scratch on the bottom of the front panel but no other battle scars or damage of any sort.

Samsung supplanted Instinct’s 3.15” touch display with three touch-sensitive controls — Back, Home, and Phone — lined up in a row just below the screen.  I liked the ability to instantly get to phone mode from anywhere in the device’s many menus, and the back button also proved quite handy as I got to know Instinct.  I also liked the hardware lock/power key and 3.5mm audio jack, both of which are mounted on the top panel of the phone.

The phone’s display is great to look at and pretty good to the touch.  With a 240 x 432 resolution capable of 262K colors, the widescreen looked excellent whether its display menus, still images or video.  I have to say that the screen was just a bit cramped for Web browsing, though, especially given the iPhone comparisons that Sprint invited with their marketing tactics.

Instinct is so chock full of features that it’s hard to list them all.  The operating system is built around easy, customizable access to the device’s myriad applications.  As such, there’s no background image or “skin” to be set on any of the menu screens (you can choose your own wallpaper for the locked-mode screensaver), and you can’t change the system font.  What you can do, though, is customize three of the four menu screens with shortcuts to the applications, Web bookmarks, contacts, and playlists you use most.  It’s a very utilitarian approach to customization, and while I did miss the personal touch of a background image on my menu screens, I also really liked the one-touch access to so many different features and services.

Okay, so on to those features and services.  There’s full navigation with turn-by-turn directions and location-based searching that’s all powered by an onboard GPS chip.  There’s a media player that can play audio or video from an SD card, via various streaming services, or take you to the Sprint Music Store so you can buy new tunes by the track.  There’s Sprint TV and Sprint Radio support (the latter is streaming audio, not FM radio).  There’s a 2MP camera with video capture.  There’s Email and Web browsing, and SMS/MMS messaging, if no Mobile IM.  There are vertical and horizontal on-screen QWERTY boards and a handwriting recognition mode.  And there’s a great voice command system that ties a lot of it together, letting you press a side-panel button and say things like, “Call Don,” or “Go to Search ... Pizza” in order to get the device to do your bidding.

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