Samsung Instinct Cell Phone Review - Conclusion

Conclusion
The Samsung Instinct is Sprint's attempt to stem the tide of customers leaving for AT&T and the iPhone. No other carrier has seen as many defections to the iPhone as Sprint. As such the Instinct is an important product for them, if this one's a bad egg they're really in trouble. Fortunately for the the Instinct is not a bad egg, in fact it's a pretty decent egg. We found the touch screen to be responsive, the interface attractive and most functions good enough that users should be happy with them. In fact the Instinct seems to have adopted a very Apple-esque approach of minimalism and ease of use over long spec sheets and power functions. This should be a net positive for most users.

There are some bad points, the stills camera is pretty poor in terms of resolution and color accuracy. We had some crashes with the phone and we feel like it's a little underpowered for everything it's being asked to do. We also didn't like the virtual QWERTY keyboard on the device, it's not as good as the iPhone's and nowhere near as good as a real QWERTY. If you can get past these issues, however, we believe you'll find the Instinct to be a very capable phone, and at $130 with a contract it'll be significantly less expensive than even the newer, lower-priced iPhone. Is the Instinct an iPhone killer? No, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to offer Sprint users a reasonable alternative, and in that it succeeds.

Who's It For

Business User
The support for Exchange email is a big plus for business users, but we still think they'd be better off with a full fledged smart phone like the BlackBerry Pearl or Palm Centro. In particular the lack of synchronization support for calendars is a big minus.

Budget Callers
The Instinct's $130 price tag might be just in range for budget callers, but the expensive monthly bills for the Simply Everything plan probably makes it a bad choice for those watching their pennies.

Chatty Teenager
We think most teenagers will love this phone, and the price tag won't make Mom and/or Dad cringe too much. The one caveat here is that the poor keyboard may annoy heavy texters.

Media Maven
The music and video playback software is decent, but so slow to launch. Throw in the poor stills camera and we think Media Mavens can probably do better elsewhere. That said it's not a terrible choice.