Samsung Instinct-M800 Review - Usability & Performance

Usability & Performance

 

Editor Rating: 4.5

---

Styling:  5 

Ease of Use:  4 

Display:  4 

Voice Quality:  4 

Battery Life:  5 

Quality/Durability:  5 

I also had a few issues with the handset not recognizing when I’d unplugged headphones - even though I’d pulled the plug, Instinct would continue to route audio through the output jack, meaning that I couldn’t hear anything.  Plugging the ‘phones back in and unplugging them again remedied the situation.  That said, audio quality through the headphones was quite good, and when I plugged a set of higher quality earbuds in to listen to music, the results were on par with a stand-alone audio player.

Using Instincts’ many non-phone features was easy.  For what the user interface might lack in the way of “Use your own images, ringtones, and fonts,” pizazz, it shines in terms of providing clear, easy to follow organization of everything you’ll want to do with the device.  The touchscreen itself is one of the best I’ve tried this side of iPhone.  Scrolling and clicking on Instinct is easier and more consistent than on the Samsung Glyde (VZW) or LG Vu (AT&T), two other recent touchscreen media phones.  Typing on the virtual keyboards was pretty good - the haptic feedback worked well, and while the vertical QWERTY board was kind of useless to me, both the horizontal QWERTY and the vertically oriented T9 layouts were great.  And the display itself, as I mentioned, is excellent.  Sprint TV was a little blocky and stuttery due to issues with the service itself, but watching MPEG-4 videos sideloaded onto a memory card was great, as was looking at digital images using Instinct’s photo viewer. 

While the media functionality on Instinct isn’t as slick or attractive as those found on iPhone, they were pretty solid.  The music and video players work, though the included 2GB memory card slows down noticeably when I loaded it with a few big video clips and 100+ photos (upgrading to a high speed memory card should help if you plan to keep a lot of photos on your Instinct).  Sprint TV and Sprint Radio also offer a wide variety of streaming media options fronted by an easy to follow user interface.  Though I found the overall experience of AT&T’s Mobile TV service on Vu just a bit better than Sprint TV on Instinct, I still enjoyed checking in on live ESPN and mobile versions of Comedy Central, MTV, and the like.  I was also able to download purchased tracks from the Sprint Music Store thanks to Instinct’s support for EV-DO Rev. A, (Instinct is Sprint’s first consumer device to support this faster version of EV-DO).

Instinct’s stand-out feature is its GPS-based navigation system and the Voice Command system that can be used to access it.  I’m not enough of an expert on stand-alone GPS units to say whether or not Instinct can replace that Garmin or Tom Tom sitting on your car’s dashboard.  But I can tell you that Instinct’s nav capabilities are great.  The handset’s large display makes it easy to follow graphical routes and step-by-step text directions, and the phone also reads directions aloud using a synthesized voice.  GPS accuracy was quite good, and the software is tied into Live Search (powered by MSN), which makes it quick and easy to find food, movies, and other services/events near your current location.  Though I should point out that maps were kind of slow to render and redraw after zooming, the overall navigation package on Instinct was excellent during my testing.

The bad news regarding Instinct’s performance mainly has to do with the Web browser and lack of synching options.  Sprint’s marketing the Instinct as having a full HTML browser, but I had trouble viewing the standard desktop version of several popular Websites including NYTimes.com and Facebook.  Instinct has JavaScript support but it didn’t work very well on my unit, and I actually couldn’t get the full version of NYTimes to load at all - it kept redirecting to the mobile version.  The browser has a button to switch between full and mobile versions of sites, but apparently it can’t override all sites in all cases.  The browser also doesn’t support Flash; navigating to YouTube loaded the mobile version of the site, and clicking on video links launched Instinct’s video player for playback.

But Instinct’s browser is a step above your standard-issue WAP browser, and its Email client is a step above your average mobile Email client.  There’s no support for HTML mail, but URLs embedded in Email messages are clickable, which is nice.  Main screen icons for Email (as well as voicemail) show a numerical count of new unread messages, and there’s a wizard for easy connection to popular Email services as well as custom POP/IMAP accounts.  Speaking of messages, text and picture messages are displayed as threaded conversations, and Instinct also features Visual Voicemail, which is straightforward, easy to use, and quite nice.