Where do I begin? Well, that's relatively easy.
1. The browser! How can you even market a phone and dub it in commericials as an "iPhone Killer" when this phone couldn't browse the broadside of a barn? The browser is a complete and utter farce. Websites as old as Supersite for Windows don't render at all. This browser memory error makes you want to chuck the phone like Russell Crowe! Epic fail. Don't even try to fix this. Just go with Opera, as much as I dislike Opera, and dump this browser completely, IMO.
2. The Apps. What apps? We're still waiting. While the IM clients are nice, they don't go far enough. Facebook has a problem rendering accurately. However, some of the best things never made it here. Audible, Kindle, eBay, Amazon, etc. The games are laughable at best. All that state of staleness of apps is thanks to the initial $5000 downpayment. Who in the heck is Sprint kidding? No wonder the App Store is killing them.
3. The Calender - Feels so counterintuitive and doesn't work very easy. This needs to be rewritten from scratch period.
4. Media Player - It was glitchy as heck when I first bought the phone. Then they allow some random error to limit songs? That's sad when the much smaller iPod shuffle and Nano does a much better job. Heck, even a Zune would be better. Samsung and Sprint should have figured a way to play protected media off the bat. Second, an equalizer should have been an option. Third, a wireless song track identification and album art functionality should have been included on day one.
5. Email - Besides the problems for corporate users which is laughable because this should have been a no issue, the lack of controls is amazing. It doesn't download custom folders, doesn't allow to transfer to custom folders, and it doesn't render in HTML. Frankly, I've seen more functionality out of a Windows 3.11 machine in 2003 than the Instinct email application. Another complete rewrite is in order.
6. Lack of true Java functionality - J2ME is terrible. Sprint knows this and will fix this. However, they didn't do anything to get Java good enough to use on the web. This compounds the issue with the browser. I don't know if its a programming limitation or just very poor implementation. I'm going to say a little bit of both. However, you can't use their Java for anything. No chatting, other java uses, and the solutions out there just aren't good enough.
7. Screen lock - This was a no brainer. This should have been figured out with prototype testing. Either a hard key or proximity sensor should have been added. The fact that we still don't have it is crazy.
8. Wi-Fi - Its been a notion that we're becoming a wireless society for sometime now. This should have been done. I would have been happy with a basic wireless g reciever. This would have gotten the job done and saved many Instinct users some battery life.
9. No Extended battery - 5.75 hours is nothing. Granted there are 3rd party stuff, but why didn't Sprint and especially Samsung take the lead here. You knew as this phone got popular that 5.75 hours even with two batteries wouldn't cut it. For example: I'd be happy with an extended cell with 2 5.75 batteries together that alternate once one is drained. that would have easily been an 11.5 hour extended battery. Two of them would be a grand total of 23 hours. Any official extended life batteries here would be a tremendous improvement.
10. Camera - I have to break this critique down into two parts.
a.) Flash - Camera have been around for centuries. Flash photography has been in use from the mid 1800's. So why in the name of Eastman Kodak would you make a digital camera on a cell phone WITHOUT A FLASH?!?!?!?! That is just fundamentally, a very bad design flaw of many cell phones. However, Samsung makes digital cameras. How do you forget such an essential part of a camera?
b.) Editing tools - Digital photography goes back to 1961. A working digital camera prototype goes back to 1975. So in the day and age of Photoshop, how the heck can you have a digital camera without the means to edit? It doesn't have to be fancy. Some simple brightness controls, cropping, color editing, black and white image change, sepia tone, red eye removal, and zoom? Thats it. Nothing fancy.
11. Paying for PAM - Why? I know there's a hack, but I don't use it. We're paying for unlimited data. Why should I pay extra for a feature that shouldn't cost extra? Its a small protocol between the phone and computer. To me, the PAM should be a feature of the Simply Everything Plan. Especially that they've stripped the TV and radio services, that would be a great way to offset what we've lost.
12. Calculator - Calculators date back centuries, with the modern one being around 1820. Calculators in the portable electronic sense have been around since the early 1970's. So how come this almost basic function was botched on a device in the 21st century?
13. Stock Ticker - On many of my less powerful phones, a basic stock ticker was included. Why did this not come to the Instinct. I know of the More Solutions stock ticker and for those who want to pay for it, thats nice. But in the day and age of free apps, RSS feeds, and the Internet, why didn't this come with the phone?
Those are truely, my biggest gripes with the M800 Instinct. Fix these 13 problems and this phone would be truely excellent to use. Now I know I'm not an unreasonable or illogical person. Somethings such as flash and Wi-Fi can't be backported to the Instinct and the s30. However, I do hope that the Instinct HD and the Instinct Q both get these features. If not, then many of the pain of 1st and 2nd generation Instinct users has truely been in vain. That would be the biggest tragedy, learning nothing from the Instinct's faults and failures.
Message was edited by: jogomez721
Message was edited by: jogomez721
) and the keyboard, because typing on it is ridiculous.
