I've had a Palm Treo 700p for a couple years and a Treo 650p before that, both with Sprint as a wireless carrier. The 700p acted up a few months ago, so I took it into a Sprint repair center. They promptly wiped it, upgraded the firmware and gave it back to me as "fixed." Only, it wasn't fixed. I'm not sure, but I think the firmware they upgraded me to wasn't intended to ever run on a 700p, but I'm not sure. As a result, the phone has kinda-sorta worked since then.

I've read on Engadget about a new phone exclusive to Sprint from Samsung called the Instinct. At first glance, it looks eerily similar to an Apple iPhone, but as I read more about it, it looked like it might be a good fit for me.

Boy, was I wrong.

Before I go into some specifics, let me just say that Samsung and Sprint can easily save this phone. All they need to do is open it up just a little more and listen to the "corporate" users.

What I liked

One thing I liked about the Instinct is that it does not run Windows Mobile. I've avoided Win-Mo on principle, but have helped other people with problems on Win-Mo devices and have experienced the frustration that is running Win-Mo. Using a Palm Treo vs. a Win-Mo Treo is the difference between night and day. One operates like cold tar (and has a lower video resolution) while the other is relatively stable and snappy.

The Instict is an awesome phone, it just isn't quite a "smartphone" and definitely isn't a geek's phone.

The "haptic feedback" is very cool: The phone generates a mild vibration when you touch an active icon on the touchscreen, thereby giving you physical feedback that you've activated a button or other onscreen feature. This goes a long way toward alleviating the "flatness" problem a lot of touchscreen devices have.

The Instinct has a very nice GPS navigation program that plots routes and gives you turn-by-turn directions. This is an amazing feature for a mobile handset that nets you $129 after rebate.

The sound quality of the phone is very, very good, both as a handset and as a speakerphone. Kudos to Samsung for that.

The web browser is "okay." It's better than the Blazer browser on the Treo, but it's not quite what it wants to be which is a browser that people will want to use more frequently than just when they're desperate for something off the Web.

The camera (still and video software is included) is, by far, the best cell phone camera I've ever used. Wow! It lacks a flash, but performed pretty dang well in low-light.

The Instinct has "visual voicemail" which is bound to become a de facto feature on new phones moving forward. Very cool.

Plugging the phone into a USB port on my laptop running Linux worked well. Linux detected a USB mass storage device and let me mount it. If I understand correctly, it's just acting as a card reader for the mini-SD card. This gives you access to all the non-phone media like pictures, movies, and music.

What I really didn't like

E-mail was a dealbreaker. The Samsung/Sprint e-mail client software tried to be very accomodating and provides wizards for setting up mobile e-mail accounts for popular webmail sites like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and GMail, but doesn't quite deliver as more than a basic e-mail client in any other regard. It does let you set up multiple POP or IMAP accounts and supports SSL-encrypted access for privacy wheres supported. However, I don't believe it's a true IMAP client because it only displays 25 of your most recent messages (I think you can bump that up to 100 in the settings) and doesn't let you access IMAP folders other than Sent, Inbox, and Trash.

Browsing HTML e-mail messages is lame because, while the Instict does take a stab at parsing the HTML, it only displays the text and does not give you any links which you can click on to view on the phone's browser.

E-mail attachment support is nonexistent.

While I don't care, the Instinct only offers a bare minimum support for Exchange users via Outlook Web Access and doesn't sync with Exchange (or anything else, for that matter).

Speaking of synchronization, Sprint does offer a remote sync feature that let's you store your contacts and other data on a remote server. The benefit of this is that if your phone is stolen or broken, you still have access to your address book. Additionally, Sprint provides a web-based facility for you to manage your contacts.

I thought this was going to be cool. I could just export my contacts from KDE's address book and import them into Sprint's web facility and, voila, all the contacts I've had on my Treo would instantly be available to me on the Instinct.

The Sprint import facility had instructions for Outlook users to export their contacts as a CSV file and even went as far as to indicate what column names were valid and would be recognized by the import routine. I tweaked the CSV file my system generated to match the column headings Sprint wanted. The import process took several minutes and then told me it couldn't import anything. Game over.

The in-phone address book is terribly lacking. For starters, there's 's no way to store a company name with an entry, only last name or first name.

Text messaging was... okay, but cumbersome.

Typing text on the Instinct is not too bad, but has some serious caveats. While the text entry routine provides spellcheck on-the-fly, it doesn't provide spelling or grammar correction on the fly at all. That seems odd considering just about every phone I've used the last ten years or so has had that. It should at least auto-conjugate and insert apostrophes when I type "cant" or "doesnt." Nope, won't do it. Even a lone "i" surrounded by whitespace on either side remains lower case. It's smart enough to capitalize the first letter after punctuation and it will highlight mispelled words (including my un-conjugated conjunctions). Tapping on a mispelled word will offer suggestions, but this is a time-consuming affair!

I registered as a developer on Sprint's Developer website hoping to create some cool third-party apps for the Instinct -- fill in some of the gaps, but got discouraged rather quickly.

In one of the developer forum posts, a developer asks, "Is there a desktop USB SDK for access to the Calendar, Notes or any other built-in data? " A Samsung developer replied: "There is no USB SDK/API supported on the Instinct."

The Sprint sales representative who helped me purchase the Instinct told me, up front, the Instinct did not support tethering so I could not use it as a wireless modem for a laptop. I thought I'd investigate that a little further before I gave up on it -- see if it looked like it would be forthcoming as an official capability or as a third-party software add-on, but it doesn't look good.

End result?

I'll be taking the Instinct back to Sprint in the next day and will either purchase a Palm Centro instead or give their technicians another shot at fixing my 700p.

Samsung and Sprint need to assign some hardware interaction and usability people to this phone. Not only are most of the applications painfully minimalistic and basic, they're not as easy to use as they could or should be. 

Again, this could be a good smartphone for Sprint if they give more attention to the needs of "professional" users.