Full Review: The Samsung M800 (Samsung Instinct)

Unfortunately, the Samsung Instinct, the most heavily advertised phone ever made by Samsung, has been measured and found wanting.
I've had the phone for about 2 weeks now and I am preparing to return it, and Sprint's plan, to the store tomorrow. That means it's review time. I'll try to keep this as pragmatic as my Voyager review but it's difficult to discuss a phone like this without mentioning its potential.

Things about the PHONE that suck:

• The battery cover is difficult to get off until you get the hang of it. Also the plastic flap that covers the charging port (at least on the phone I had) is hard as hell to remove. Every time I have done this I've needed to use something else like a knife or a paperclip to open the flap.
• The battery life is pretty awful, but the unit ships with a 2nd battery that's easy to change once you figure out how to get the back cover off. The poor performance of mine may have been to the poor Sprint coverage where I live, as I was constantly moving into roaming areas.

Things about the PHONE that are sweet:

• A full size stereo headphone jack. Not a mini-jack. It's good to see a media phone with physical media attributes.
• The touchscreen is GREAT
• The speaker is incredibly loud.
• The camera takes good pictures.
• The speed is great, WHEN you have signal.

Things about the PLATFORM that are sweet:

• The navigation is great, with the scrolls and the flicks, and the taps. They clearly took a lot of cues from the iPhone, and came up with a really fun interface.
• The keyboard is amazing. It's incredibly versatile. Everywhere you could type you could use a full landscape QWERTY keyboard, a portrait quasi-dvorak keyboard, or handwriting recognition. (although I really couldn't get it to recognize more than 3 letters at a time. You've gotta write big)
• Visual Voicemail is well done
• Messaging is really cool, texts and pictures are threaded by contact.
• The photo gallery has a lot of TouchFLO style things, makes it real fun to use it.
• Pretty much all the updates are Over The Air.
• The music player actually keeps playing if you leave the application, you can listen to tunes AND check your email! WOAH!
• The email application is easy to setup, works with almost everything (I had mine with 2 OWA accounts, a gmail, and an IMAP). Although word around the forums is it has some problems with POP.
• The navigation app is a gem. It is clear, rather accurate, and tied nicely into the movies and live search functions. Location based features on the phone really get tied together here. The thing even checks the traffic for you. It's like having a real GPS.
  
• "Movies Near Me", Such a cool button. It locates you with GPS then finds theaters near you and displays movies, from there you can view showtimes, get driving directions, call the theaters.
• Live Search, open the app, push a button, tell the phone what you want. Excellent voice driven functions.
• Weather application is one of the best things I found. I checked it every morning, got morning/afternoon/evening forecasts and Doppler radar images.
  

Things about the PLATFORM that suck:

• This phone is too new. Samsung and Sprint rushed it out to compete with the iPhone, and it shows. In the 2 weeks I've had the phone every app has been updated about 2-3 times. Some of these updates broke features that used to work. And Sprint has not done well with communicating timelines for the updates or WHAT they actually changed to their users. Not EVERYTHING about Apple is worth copying.
  
• The browser is slow and kludgy. Opera Mobile won't work (well).
• The platform uses a custom set of widgets which doesn't play well with standard J2ME, so most applications that COULD work don't. Mostly because they can't access the keyboard.
• The built in calendar can only store 9 appointments at any given time.
• The email application will sometimes inform you that you have new messages, when you don't. Or grossly miscount the number of messages you do have. I once had it tell me I had 63 emails when I had 7.
• The phone cannot sync with Exchange/OWA for calendar, or use your Google Calendar outside of the browser. This is likely due to the builtin calendar being such a POS. The company that built the email application has software capable of doing this...Sprint/Samsung either decided they didn't want it on the phone or that it would've taken too long to develop the feature.
• The phone has no instant messaging application. None of the free ones will work due to lack of keyboard, and the only online ones you have access to are static and awful because of the lack of a good browser.
• The music application, while being really good and even having some features my iPod lacks, has an unfortunate habit of rescanning my entire memory card each time I start it. This takes almost a minute for 4-5 gigs of music, and the phone can take MicroSD cards up to 8 gigs.
• Sprint's network is pretty bad. I'm roaming in most of the building where I work, and everywhere in my house. Including a decent amount of the area OUTSIDE my house.

That being said I still think the phone is incredibly cool, and for the most part really don't mind the idea of owning it. They need to fix the calendar, add OWA sync with it, either add an IM application or fix the keyboard problem, and get some version of Opera Mobile supported fully. If they can pull this off they can win, but people are rapidly losing faith in the phone...time is running out. If they work these kinks out they have a major edge over Verizon or iPhone, since they have a free SDK and you don't need to pay licensing just to get your apps on the phone. Without a certificate you can't access "restricted" APIs, but a cert with Sprint is much less expensive than the Qualcomm version you need to do BREW development. Also the whole thing is Java (J2ME), which makes it simpler to write applications for than C++ or Objective C. (in my opinion anyway).

I'll be paying close attention to this one and might try it again after I graduate, if I move somewhere with better Sprint coverage.

--PXA