Two weeks back I purchased the SAMSUNG Instinct phone and upgraded my account with sprint. I am a loyal sprint customer and I would like to remain to be one. However I have an issue with SPRINT now. Sprint marketed the phone to be “THE iPhone killer”. I believed Sprint. I believed all the reviewers out there who got their hands on this little cute device at the consumer electronics show earlier this year. I believed all those Youtube videos until I got my hands on the phone. While the phone is a capable mobile device, it is not an iPhone killer. No way, NUNCA, NADA. iPhone has one  big feature which none of these PDA/smart phones have. It is not what Mr.David Pogue's (of NYT) said about the 2.0 software combined with “the apps store (at this point). These widgets, icons ... etc are available from third party developers for Windows Mobile platform. If you want to compare the APPLE APPS with another third party developer, check out the Yahoo Go for Windows Mobile .The one cool feature of the iPhone is the SAFARI browser. It is the best internet browsing experience amongst the PDA smart phones. The super performing SAFARI combined with the zoom feature makes the iPhone the best mobile device. APPLE said they are giving the customer a desktop browsing experience on the iPhone. There is no exaggeration in that claim.

Enough of the iPhone, I really wanted to write about my experience with the SAMSUNG Instinct. And I would want to stick to that. Unlike Walt Mossberg of WSJ.com, who mentioned iPhone many times in Instinct review, I am not going to mention iPhone.

IMHO Instinct is a nice device which can be used as a partial PDA.

Following are the best features

• GPS.
• SMS.
• Three main icons on Main Screen.
• Address book and Speed Dial.
• Voicemail.

Following are the worst features

• Browser.
• Lack of email attachment viewing software.
• SPRINT TV.
• Voice activated dialing.
• Lack of third party applications.
• Screen size.
• Phone as a modem capability.
• Camera

Let's start with the best features. GPS is the first one on my list. I did a very extensive testing of the GPS covering 1000 miles. The thing is as good as any TOM TOM or GARMIN. It has that intelligent traffic reroute option. I tested against some known routes in Pennsylvania, MD, NY , and it did the very best job of rerouting based on traffic incidents. No GPS is as good as a human equipped with a google maps. But this was closest to the way we manually plan routes by looking at the map. Kudos to the GPS. 

Next in the list is SMS. The software used in the phone is intuitive. The history saves the message thread. It is easy to send message by tapping the name on the address book then click on the message icon. The user interface was so clean that I was able to easily access and comprehend all of the past message threads.

The three main icons on the bottom of the phone provided the user easy navigation between the many features. I was able to get back to home with a single touch on the home button. Occasionally, I did not like the way the phone closed the applications when I pressed the back button. While in the middle of a Navigation session, I wanted to check something on the internet. I pressed the back button then I was prompted to close the Navi application. I had similar experience with the browser. The browser lost its previous pages and forced me to the home page.

Address book and Speed Dial are my next favorite features. I loved the clean scrolling address book. Accessing the names and numbers was easy. I was able to store 5 numbers for some of the names. Accessing the type of the phone ( home , mobile , office ) for the address book entries was easy, you just have to press the little box next to the name. The speed dial feature was another cleverly thought design. I added most dialed names into this category. Accessing them was a breeze. I was able to make phone calls with two touches from phone option.

 Voicemail is the last good feature. Needless to say that this is a copied feature and will be a standard in the upcoming smartphones.

Now the bad part.

The Browser is the thing that I hated the most on this phone. The  browser sucks and sucks big time. It is sloooooow. I am not sure the issue is related to the network though. Navigation inside the page is not smooth at all. The browser is the sole reason I am planning to return my phone. The browser is sluggish, crashes, unresponsive and takes forever to load. It is a joke that Sprint is marketing this as a killer to that other benchmark device. I was not able to open a successful webpage for www.nytimes.com, www.buy.com, www.papajohns.com, www.cvs.com, www.jandr.com .... the list goes on. After seeing the safari browser on the Apple beauty Instinct looks like a 486 processor running on a 32 mb RAM with Windows95 :-). Why on earth SAMSUNG,Sprint and Teleca ( http://www.teleca.com/) came up with this OBIGO browser which is neither feature rich as IE nor efficient as the Safari. Currently no PDA manufacture has that desktop browsing like feel that iPhone provides. But I expected SAMSUNG and Teleca to do a better job at providing a faster browser experience. Why on earth creating a smart browser is a rocket science?

IMHO, the OBIGO browser ruins this otherwise fine smart phone. I hope SPRINT will upgrade the software on Instinct sooner than later. I called the tech support to fix the issue. I was told to perform some dumb drill procedures like shutting down the phone, removing the battery, upgrade the DATA profile .... etc. I knew none of this could fix the issue. I was having so many high hopes on this fake iPhone killer, but this browser ruined my all my hopes. I really really hope SPRINT do something about it. Mr.Hesse are you listening ? The browser sucks, fix it please , its not rocket science.

The next one in the list is LACK of Email Attachment Viewing software. Why do people do stupid things? Instinct does gives you the ability to get your email but stop you from viewing the attachments? Hmm whoever designed that email client application must be sleeping in Kansas or in South Korea. Why give the user the option to download emails if the attachment file is not viewed ? Why oh why ? to save it to the SD card ? Thank you very much.

SPRINT TV is the next bad feature. Sprint did some ground work earlier in creating this service. But the Instinct lacks the video clarity while playing the TV shows. I am not a big fan of watching distorted videos. But I am fine with this feature. I used this feature to calm my two year old. She liked Dora the explorer videos on a long weekend trip.

Voice Activated Dialing is another non efficient feature. Most of the time the Instinct didn't understand my ENGLISH. I am not sure it is confused with my Indian accent, or totally clueless of what I was saying. I was saying call sreedhar , the system prompted me to call Anand ? Hmm. Its not even closer phonetically. Its time for these manufactures to pay a closer look at the Indian names. After all Indians (Indian Americans included) are the second largest ethnic group in the world. I am not saying that the device should include Indian names, but a general simple smart translation of the ENGLISH word technique would fix this issue. Its not only for Indian names, but any non ENGLISH names ( Chinese, Japanese ,.. ) If it’s a big deal to update the software, then I prefer the old way of recording your own voice thing. That worked at least.

Lack of third party applications, I wish someone writes good third party applications for this phone. The current games are lame. I loved the pool game in my Sanyo KATANA. This phone needs some serious third party apps to compete with other smart phones and build an eco system.

Screen size could be couple of millimeters larger. Also why do they need to waste a valuable real estate on the bottom with SAMSUNG name on it? It would have made a good marketing feature if they increased the screen size a bit or at least cleverly used the available one. The browser application suffered from the screen size.

PAM , Phone as a modem capability, I mentioned that the browser is the sole reason for me to not like this phone. I would have kept it, if the phone has a modem capability. I could have used it for connecting my laptop to the internet. But it does not have that feature. Too bad. This is another feature where the Instinct could have been trumped the rival.

Camera , I am not a big fan of these cameras. But I expected SAMSUNG to do a better job with the shooting modes and quality of the picture. The camera belongs to the "also ran" category. I could care less for this feature, but many prospective buyers would want this feature. SAMSUNG does make some digital cameras, why can’t they put a 3 or 4 meaga pixel one with nice optics.? The picture quality was not great. Clearly SAMSUNG rushed this to the market without enough testing.

Conclusion.

My initial thought after the browser experience was “This phone sucks, why did Sprint called this as an iPhone killer"? But after two weeks of owning it, I liked few features. The GPS is the most practical one. I believe many users will like the GPS in this phone. Another good feature I missed to tell you is the Microsoft Live Search. This is a nice and accurate feature. I was able to get post office, pharmacy, restaurant .... information along with the active phone number. The search results were grouped together i.e. if you were searching for post office, the search came back with one post office entry with no of post offices inside a parenthesis. And there are some minor irritants I didn't like. One of them is the world time setting program. Instinct omitted many world cities. I am not happy about this feature.

Overall it is a good phone, not a killer one. SAMSUNG and SPRINT could have competed with the iPhone if they had a decent browser. The current one sucks really.

If you are big on office work, go for the Berry, Microsoft Mobile or even iPhone ( Yes with the built in support for VPN and MS Office viewing capability). If you prefer to own a nice GPS unit and a phone with touch screen interface then the SAMSUNG Instinct is for you.

Post Script, How about borrowing (begging) that SAFARI from APPLE ? They can sell it. There is no exclusivity deal on the BROWSER J