Samsung Instinct Cell Phone Review - Battery Life

The Instinct's call time was reasonable and the music playback time was very good. If you like to browse the web, however, you won't like the Instinct's poor battery life when online. We suspect having that large screen on is what's contributing to the poor battery life there. For more information about our battery tests see this article.

Call Time (5.56)
The Samsung Instinct lasted four hours thirty-eight minutes in our test of call time. You can see below that this is slightly below average and amongst our comparison phones only the Palm Centro performed worse. It's not terrible, however, and all but the biggest talkers should find it sufficient to get through the day, depending on how much you use the phone for things other than calls. Given that the Instinct has a large display that's battery hungry and is definitely a multi-function device we found the call time reasonable.

Call Time (min)

Music Playback (9.91)
For music playback the Instinct lasted an impressive thirteen hours forty-six minutes in our test. This is way above average and unmatched by any of our comparison phones, as you can see below. We believe that the Instinct's excellent time in this test is due to the fact that the battery-hungry screen was off while music was playing. Also you don't  need to use the network to play music. This result is good news for anyone who wants to use the Instinct as their primary music device, you can listen to hours of music on the Instinct and still have juice left over for other functions.

Music Playback Time (min)

Web Browsing (3.58)
The Samsung Instinct did not perform well in our battery test of web browsing time, lasting only two hours fifty-nine minutes. You can see below that this is way below average and significantly shorter than any of our comparison phones. We believe that the biggest impact on the Instinct's web browsing time, apart from the data use, was that the screen was on and fully bright for the entire test. In our talk time test the screen dims and in our music test it's off entirely. The point is you shouldn't expect to be able to browse the web a lot on the Instinct without the battery dying quickly.

Browsing Time (min)

Idle Time unscored
In order to ensure that we deliver reviews in a timely fashion we don't test idle time. Unfortunately neither Samsung nor Sprint provide information about idle time.