Full Samsung Instinct HD Review

Hello.

For today I've found the preview for the Samsung Instinct HD. May be I will change my phone.

Look and Feel – Good

Sprint's new Samsung Instinct HD is a slick, slim tablet phone with a nicely rounded shell. It's a very light phone, even with the battery installed. The overall look is simple and classy, without being too grown-up. Underneath the colorful, 3.2-inch touchscreen are a trio of touch sensitive buttons, and we're never fans of touch buttons versus real hardware keys, though the few problems we had with unresponsive control on the Samsung Instinct HD came from the capacitive screen and not the buttons beneath. On the sides of the phone you'll find a 2-stage camera button, great for lining up the auto focus before you fire a shot, as well as ports for microUSB and even high definition video output. The video cable costs extra, but for another $30 you can show high def movies, shot with the Samsung Instinct HD's eponymous HD camcorder, on your own HDTV.

The interface on the Samsung Instinct HD is touch friendly, but it hasn't advanced much since the original Samsung Instinct was released in the run-up to the launch of the Apple iPhone 3G. The phone now uses a capacitive screen, which means it should be more sensitive to fingers than the pressure-sensitive resistive technology found on the older devices, but in our time with the Instinct HD, it didn't feel more responsive than its predecessors. There were plenty of times we'd press a button onscreen and nothing would happen. Or, we'd get a haptic vibration and a little ding telling us the phone had registered a hit, but the interface wouldn't take action. It was frustrating, and the phone never approached the great look and responsive speed of a better touchscreen device, like the Sprint HTC Hero.

The Samsung Instinct HD does have some cool tricks up its sleeve. If you want to silence an incoming call quickly, or snooze the phone when the alarm clock goes off, you can flip the phone onto its face instead of fumbling for buttons. Press the shutter button quickly and the still camera pops up; or hold down the button to activate the camcorder. Of course, there are some serious complaints. The software keyboards on the phone are awful. In portrait mode, the keyboard is arranged alphabetically, instead of in a QWERTY layout, as if Samsung's designers had never used a real keyboard before. In landscape mode, the keys were nice and wide, but the keyboard couldn't keep up with fast typing, and we ended up missing quite a few letters if we didn't slow down. The keyboard also wasn't smart enough to keep up with the latest tricks. It won't capitalize the first word in a sentence automatically, it won't fill in the apostrophe in a contraction, and it didn't correct our errors on the fly, like a touchscreen smartphone will do.

Calling and Contacts - Good

We had serious reception issues with the Samsung Instinct HD, but this never seemed to affect calls or call quality. Calls sounded generally good. We heard some fuzziness at times, and our callers reported a metallic quality to our voices, but this never hurt our conversations. Battery life was also pretty good. We got more than 5.5 hours of talk time out of the phone, and if we didn't use the camera features extensively, the Samsung Instinct HD could last a couple days without needing a charge. But you won't want to record much HD video in the morning if you won't be near a charger later in the day. Reception was the biggest problem of all. Service never reached above 3 bars, and usually dipped so low we wondered if the phone got any data reception at all. Some features, like the Web browser and Sprint Music Store access, had lots of trouble opening when reception dipped, though as we said, voice calls weren't affected.

Getting contacts onto the phone could be a big pain. The phone can synchronize with Sprint's backup services, but it wasn't able to draw our address book off the Internet. There is a Work E-mail feature that will connect to a Microsoft Exchange server, but this won't synchronize your address book. You have to manually move contacts one-by-one from the Work E-mail app to the phonebook, which seemed barely worth the trouble. The poor keyboard options on the Samsung Instinct HD only made matters worse. If you have a lot of friends in your address book online, better to buy a phone that can handle serious sync duties.

For calling features, the Samsung Instinct HD comes nicely loaded. There's a dedicated button on the side of the phone for speaker-independent voice calling from Nuance, and this worked perfectly every time we tried it. It was easy to add a third person for a conference call, though the phone can't split the 3-way up again once they've been joined. The speakerphone was nice and clear, though it could have been louder. For voice messages, the Samsung Instinct HD uses Sprint's visual voicemail service, and this worked very nicely on the phone. The Instinct HD makes it easy for you to listen to messages without calling into Sprint's voice mail, even out of order.

Camera – Very Good

The Samsung Instinct HD is the only phone on the U.S. carrier market that can shoot HD video. You can shoot lower quality footage as well, for multimedia messages (MMS) or DVD-resolution, VGA footage, but the real star of the show is the 1280 by 720, or 720p, video capture. There aren't many settings or options to improve video quality, but in the best conditions videos looked very good. They couldn't quite compete with our dedicated HD camcorder, but it was certainly on par with one of the miniature HD camcorders on the market. Most importantly, in broad daylight the Samsung Instinct HD takes the best video we've seen on a cell phone, and this might be enough to convince you it's the phone you want. Under difficult lighting conditions, we see plenty of noise and blocking, and the picture looks decidedly standard; it doesn't look like good high definition content, though the pixels are all there. The still camera on the Samsung Instinct HD is also solid. It wasn't the best we've seen, but it did a great job with most of our shots. Colors were vibrant and accurate, especially outdoors on a sunny day, but the camera also balanced well when we were shooting in complete darkness, using only the built-in LED flash for lighting. The Instinct HD uses auto focus, but not touch focus, like you'll find on more advanced smartphone cameras, and it lacks a few other shooting modes we like, especially panorama stitching. Macro mode wasn't very effective, either, and the camera couldn't focus on fine details when we got too close. Still, pics from the Samsung Instinct HD would be perfect for social network sharing and sending as MMS, and we even printed a few good looking pics on quality photo paper, a feat few cameraphones can pull off with such skill.

Social Networking - Good

For a feature phone without a genuine smartphone OS, Samsung has gone to great lengths to connect the Samsung Instinct HD with the most popular social networks. There are preloaded apps for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on the phone. Unfortunately, these apps just didn't work very well on the Instinct HD. Sometimes they were simply unresponsive to our touch or slow to update with new info. Other times we found them lacking features, especially the Twitter app. The Facebook app was constantly forgetting us, which was annoying the first time we had to reenter our sign-on info, and worse every subsequent time. You can't sync contacts or calendar entries from these services to your phone, like you can with a BlackBerry Tour or other advanced smartphones. You can upload pics and videos easily from within the apps, but things got much more complicated when we tried uploading from out photo gallery, as these images have to bounce through Sprint's own online upload service. These apps are still an improvement over the simple, mobile Web versions that you might get if you tried a more basic phone, but against the smartphone set, the social networking experience on the Samsung Instinct HD doesn't quite compare.

The Samsung Instinct HD can also handle e-mail, including work e-mail for corporate Microsoft Exchange users, but the e-mail experience all around seems half-baked. The phone was constantly reporting the wrong number of new messages until we forced a manual sync. There were few advanced options for organizing or searching our mail, and for our corporate account, the e-mail app couldn't check our Inbox subfolders. We like that you can see a bit of the new messages incoming from the main menu screen without having to open the e-mail apps, but the mail feature was just unreliable enough that we still kept opening and synchronizing our mailboxes to be sure we weren't missing anything.

For text messaging, the Samsung Instinct HD uses a threaded format, which presents all incoming and outgoing messages together to form a conversation, instead of individually. Multimedia messages (MMS) were easy to send from the phone, whether we were browsing the photo gallery, taking shots with the camera or simply responding to an incoming message with a new picture attachment.

Multimedia - Good

Music and video playback on the Samsung Instinct HD are a mixed bag. For the most part, everything works the way it should, so with little effort you'll be able to sideload your music onto the included 4GB microSD card and listen to your tunes how you like. That also means a 3.5mm headphone jack right up top, so you can plug in your favorite earbuds. There aren't many features built into the player, no equalizer controls and, strangely, about half our album artwork didn't sync properly. Creating playlists was more difficult than it needed to be, and the player was sometimes buggy or unresponsive. We were also never able to access the Sprint Music Store on this phone, as it always complained of network trouble, even after some software updates and restarts.

Video fared a little better, thanks to a robust player, though only a little. All our videos played on the device, even some very large files that were sized beyond the 480 by 320 pixel resolution of the Samsung Instinct HD's display. Larger videos were a bit choppy as the phone chewed through them, but most phones just spit those files back at us. Videos sized properly for the Instinct HD's crisp screen looked great on the phone and played through smoothly with no trouble. Again, there was a dearth of extra features, but with some advanced file preparation and proper sideloading, the Samsung Instinct HD makes a very nice video player.

Besides your own files, the Samsung Instinct HD is also capable of playing back streaming media from Sprint's 3G services. These are mostly streaming clips, and in terms of video these weren't worth the effort. The menus to control the streaming Sprint TV service were sluggish and confusing, and the end result wasn't compelling enough to pay extra for the content. The Samsung Instinct HD also gets streaming radio from Sirius XM, but this doesn't include best premium content available on the satellite radio service, like the live sports broadcasts or the Howard Stern show. For music, the streaming radio features don't compete with similar services available free on smartphones, like Slacker radio on BlackBerry devices or Pandora, available on most smartphones.

Traveling - Mediocre

The turn-by-turn navigation features on the Samsung Instinct HD were perhaps the biggest disappointment on the device. The phone ships with Sprint Navigator onboard, a TeleNav app, and usually we're big fans of TeleNav's software. But the Samsung Instinct HD did a poor job tracking us on our trips. As we sat motionless at a traffic light, we watched the phone constantly reroute our trip, as if we were not only moving, but jumping all over the map. Occasionally, this would happen just before an important turn, and we missed crucial directions. After a few frustrating trips, we decided to pass on navigating with the Samsung Instinct HD, and if navigation is truly important to you, you'll want to pass on this phone.

The phone isn't really made for serious travelers, anyway. The Instinct HD comes with Google Maps, but it's a version that lacks necessary features. Google Maps can't even tie into the phone's GPS receiver to find your location, you have to manually enter a starting point. If you're in a country that doesn't support Sprint's network standard, you can still use Wi-Fi for data, but there aren't any other travel tools built in.

Fun - Good

The Samsung Instinct HD tries to have fun, it really does. You can tell by the "Fun" menu tab on the main screen (though we think the "Fun" and "My Stuff" tabs should be swapped). The phone comes preloaded with a few game demos, a few Web-based apps and a Shopping link to download more content. Most of the content available will be simpler, mobile-type gaming, but good enough to pass the time. There's a YouTube app to watch videos from the streaming service, as well as Sprint's own NASCAR and NFL Mobile apps to help you track your favorite drivers and teams. Still, almost every Sprint phone comes with similar apps installed, including much less expensive feature phones, and the Samsung Instinct HD offers nothing special here, when it truly needs a special experience to set it apart and justify the high price tag. If you're a fan of Uno or Tetris, the Samsung Instinct HD has you covered, but we wish the phone offered something more unique.

Staying Informed - Good

One of the strong points of all the preloaded apps on the Samsung Instinct HD is the wide selection to keep you up to date on business, sports and World news. Though the phone uses the Opera Mobile browser, we were less impressed with the Web browsing software on this phone, and most users will be content to get their information from the preloaded Web apps. There's an app for ESPN, Bloomberg, CNN and even Weather.com. These didn't look great, not even as good as their respective Web pages on a desktop-grade browser, but they did a nice job collecting information in a way that was easy to read on a mobile device. A few times during our test run, the software would get an upgrade, and the process could be convoluted and confusing, but we never managed to delete any important apps accidentally.

The Web browser should have been much better, but it didn't live up to our expectations. The Opera Mobile browser opens pages full screen, but text is a jumble and illegible until you zoom in. At full zoom, text still looked lanky and thin on screen, thanks to the poor font choice, and the Opera Mobile interface was not very friendly or intuitive. Once we got the hang of it, though, we managed to open multiple pages in a slick-looking tabbed view, though typing new addresses could be a pain thanks to the Samsung Instinct HD's keyboard problems. You can flick through pages for so-called kinetic scrolling, but once again the capacitive screen was surprisingly sluggish and unresponsive, and we felt a delay against our actions.

The Opera Mobile browser did a nice job with Google Reader, but the browser also comes with one of the best RSS readers we've seen on a mobile device. In fact, this was probably the best way to keep up to date with our favorite sites, as the RSS reader did a better job feeding us information than checking the page in its entirety.