The Not so Smart Phone
Owned Gen1 and Gen2 of Instinct

I guess a turd is a turd, but being wet seemed to sound worse.

When I first got the SI, I was coming from the days of the clam shell styled phone and found the SI EASY it was to navigate and use. In retrospect, that was a quaint thought. However, the navigation capabilities of the GPS software has been superior to anything else I've used and the Internet search tools have also been great.

At first I enjoyed the phone, I had a full plan with all of the bells and whistles, with a couple presses of the finger, I could find a great Thai eatery or the phone number of a business. You wanted to know the weather, there was apparently an "app" for that.


Next thing I know, the link for Weather requires me to put in my zip every time and click on something else, the movie app requires a bunch of additional pressing and wasted time loading useless images, Facebook requires me to login too often and so forth - It's almost like Sprint cares as little as I began to about this phone. To top it off, these things aren't apps at all, just broken URLs.


The Radio App sucks, unless you just like top 10 music, the video worked OK but it was stupid stuff to watch, like Disney or bad ABC news programs. The weather clip was needless.


The mp3 playback is horrible, I continually had problems with it, plus I had to manually build playlists, the thing was too stupid to understand folder arrangements. It would continually try to play everytrack or read them all and them complain that it exceeded some limit. It had to read the card every time (instead of the index or something) and it was VERY SLOW. The experience was completely miserable, and when it actually started playing, if you switched to the web or something you could easily cause the whole thing to lock up. I don't know what kind of OS this thing is running but it's very unimpressive.


The keyboard was flaky, you were supposed to be able to alter it to your liking but it never liked me, also the OS would delay at times and you would type a whole word and it would wait before displaying it or giving you the vibrate feedback. It all made for an awkward experience.


At the end of the day, getting this phone is a HUGE compromise - You can certainly live with it, but should ask why? As I said before, it works good as a phone, GPS, and for text messaging, but in this day in age, shouldn't that be expected of a "smart" phone?