Phone Review

Sprint's Simply Everything plans were a part of the original Instinct's charm. Sprint led the way to unlimited plans-- voice, data, GPS navigation, Sprint TV and Radio, text and MMS messaging last year. For those who want it all, and the Instinct is the poster child for doing it all, these plans are a bargain. Fast forward to 2009 and the great recession and we wonder if folks are as eager to jump onto all you can eat plans, even if they do represent significant savings over adding services individually. Everything plans start at $69.99/month for 450 minutes of prime time talk time and unlimited everything else (data, TV, messaging, navigation and more). $99.99 gets you unlimited talk time too. Since the Instinct S30 supports most every service Sprint offers, the plan is a perfect fit, and you won't get warnings telling you that you must add plan features to use the applications and services on the Instinct S30.

The Instinct is a dual band digital CDMA phone with 1xRTT and EVDO Rev. 0. It's a mystery to us why Samsung and Sprint downgraded EVDO from the faster Rev. A to Rev. 0 on the S30 vs. original Instinct. Sprint has added Opera Mini to the pre-installed applications and you can access it by going to the Fun tab on the homescreen, then selecting Games/Apps, then Opera Mini. Opera Mini is a free download, but we're still glad to see Sprint and Samsung pre-install it since it's fast and familiar to many phone users. Aside from Opera Mini, the built-in browser supports HTML web sites and has desktop and mobile rendering modes, though the desktop mode isn't going to win any awards. A year ago on the Instinct, the web browser was pretty good for a feature phone, but now with other capable feature phones on the market, it seems just OK. Web page download times are a little slow, which is in part due to the browser's slow rendering engine and in part to Rev. 0.

Voice quality and volume have improved over the original Instinct, and the S30 has quite good voice quality and enough volume for somewhat noisy locations. The speakerphone is loud and reasonably clear except at max volume (many phones distort at max volume). The phone works well with Bluetooth headsets and it supports A2DP stereo over Bluetooth. Strangely, the screen doesn't shut off during a call.

The on-screen dialer is easy to use and each number is marked with letters to facilitate vanity dialing. Though the Instinct's tabbed selections for speed dial, contacts and call history are handy, we wish that tapping the call button brought up the dialer as the default tab rather than speed dial. There's no one-touch way to get to the dialer nor can you use smart dial to enter a number when on the homescreen since there's no software or hardware keypad/QWERTY.

The Instinct seems to have simply everything: Sprint TV, Sprint Radio, NFL mobile, Nascar mobile, a music player and a good selection of available games. The GPS and Sprint Navigation work very well. The phone gets a fix quickly and holds onto satellites even at highway speeds. The navigation software provides on-screen maps, POIs and spoken turn-by-turn directions that are clear and reasonably loud over the phone's speaker. Sprint TV didn't work as well for us, even with a good EVDO signal. We noted serious artifacting (blocky video) that was sometimes so bad the video wasn't watchable. It's a shame given the Instinct S30's large display that would be perfect for watching streaming video. Perhaps Sprint will fine tune the service to work better with the S30 as time goes on.

For tunes, the phone has a music player, supports Sprint's music store and has Sprint Radio which worked fine.

The 2.0 megapixel camera with fixed focus lens takes decent photos but it shows no improvement over the original Instinct. The camera has a self-portrait mirror but no flash and it can shoot both photos and video and send these via Picture and Video Mail (Sprint's terms for MMS).

The Instinct S30, like the original Instinct, is a fun phone that's ripe with features. From Sprint TV to GPS to music and web, it's got the goods. More attractive than the original Instinct, the S30 really offers no other incentive to upgrade. EVDO has been downgraded from Rev. A to Rev. 0 and there's no second battery in the box. To the S30's credit, battery life is better than the first gen Instinct, so the missing spare battery might not be a terrible sore point. If you're looking to move up from a more basic feature phone to a touch screen phone with all the bells and whistles on Sprint, the S30 is a solid choice, though it now faces serious competition from other carriers' touch screen phones.

Pro: Attractive, large display, supports every Sprint service for multimedia and navigation. Good GPS performance.

Con: Sprint TV performance is weak, touch screen OS is starting to look clunky compared to other models on the market (notably Samsung's Touch Wiz phones like the Eternity, Impression, Memoir and Behold along with the iPhone). Sorry, no WiFi here.