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Samsung Instinct s30 Phone, Bronze (Sprint)
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Consumer Ratings and
Reviews for Samsung Instinct s30 Phone, Bronze (Sprint) |
Rating:
| | Review: SPRINT & SAMSUNG MISSED BIG TIME
| My Wife and I bought Instinct 30's. Mistake all the way. The concept is great, services are great, the Isttrument is really weak. Lots of locking up, dropping out on calls, function keys are at time plain useless.
If Sprint will do the right thing and offer Instinct 30 owners a good discount on a NEW PHONE (preferrably a smart phone we would be overjoyed. |
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Rating:
| | Review: Samsung Instinct s30 = Flaming Dumpster Fire
| Once a year I call Sprint and threaten to change service providers if they don't meet some set of outrageous demands of mine. Desperate to cling to their position as the number three mobile phone service provider, they generally concede some combination of a discounted bill and free gear. This little game of cat-and-mouse has been going on for about six years and I'm generally pretty happy with Sprint's willingness to cooperate.
This year, my major gripe was (and still is), that I want a freakin' iPhone just like everybody else - why... because it's awesome and everyone knows that. After demanding to be switched immediately to cancellations and a few minutes of impassioned whining, Sprint gave me a discount on my monthly plan and offered me two Samsung s30 "smart" phones, which they touted as a direct substitute for the iPhone, capable of performing every task that the Apple product does and more! I graciously accepted and congratulated myself for once again putting the screws to my service provider; well, this time the joke was on me. Congratulations Sprint... you win this time.
For starters, comparing an iPhone to this piece of trash is equivalent to comparing an ice cold beer to old boot filled with warm toilet water. Just turning the phone on is a virtual clinic in poor product design, as you have to hold down the power button to unlock the screen. Besides being inconvenient, this is just plain stupid since if you hold it down to long it turns the phone off.
As a music player, the s30 is unusable. All files must be dragged into a folder on the micro-SD card, and at least half of them will not be recognized by the phone's music player. There is no interface that you can use on the computer that allows you to organize or make playlists, and the phone's music player interface is horrendous.
As a browser, it is slow and unreliable, and any attempt to select an object on the screen using the touch screen inevitably ends with you repeatedly smashing your finger into the screen in frustration until it randomly decides to actually function. A portion of the screen is occupied by controls that could have easily been incorporated into the phone's buttons to preserve precious screen space.
The NFL live function is great, as long as you remember to touch the screen every 7 seconds, because if you allow it to go into energy save mode the audio feed stops. Sprint radio has an unreliable feed and no fast forward / rewind function, so when it crashes, which it inevitably will do every several minutes, you have to start listening to the program over again from the beginning. Aside from that, the audio on Sprint radio is inexplicably too low, even if the audio setting is just fine for the phone and music player. Sprint TV is just a straight waste of everyone's time.
Neither the music, radio or TV function transmit to a Bluetooth headset; so if you want to use them while walking around you'll need to carry around headphones or rely on the phone's speaker.
The games are idiotic and you have to buy them after about 1 minute of free trial play. There are no apps. The e-mail works okay, that is, until it stops working... which it does every 3-4 weeks at which time I have to delete the account and reload it. Finally, the phone's operating system completely freezes about once per day so that the only option is to remove and replace the battery.
The GPS is actually pretty good.
In summary, this phone is good for phone calls, texts and GPS. It is only marginally more useful than antique flip phone that it replaced. Whenever I see a friend enjoying the features, apps, and graceful user-interface of their iPhone, I am instantly filled with a surge of jealousy so intense and tangible that it seems to fill the air around me and I can't breathe.
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Rating:
| | Review: Very Nice Features..
| THIS IS NOT A SMARTPHONE! However, it offers more than other feature phones. It's in the gray area so to speak. If you have the original, your next phone should be a smartphone.
Pros - excellent features that are easy to use. Great touchscreen response. Very fast performance going from screen to screen. Able to download programs like stocks, file manager, ms pacman, voice recorder, checkbook register, finance calculator etc from [...]. Live search and gps are awesome. At the end of day, it has above average call clarity and volume. This is simply an easy, fun phone to use with a nice size screen.
Cons - TV pixelation is horrible or so I thought. Other Sprint phones have these same issues, but it looks worst on the S30 b/c the screen is larger. The slim battery does not last a day (for me anyway). When making calls, the backlight does not shut off! It can make your face hot after five minutes, not to mention drain more battery life. Screen resolution needs to be upgraded to take better advantage of the screen size.
Purchased the extended battery with new battery cover. Can talk about 7 hours easily. Also, have Samsung stylus that attaches to the phone near the headphone jack. Works great. It can also handle a 32gb microsd card (double the 16gb that is listed).
This is the best feature phone Sprint offers. |
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Rating:
| | Review: A truly great phone
| I agree, this phone rocks! I have owned cell phones since they first showed up on the consumer market and I can say with all honesty that this is one of the best if not the best I have ever owned. I will say right off that it's web interface is terrible but still usable, and it's camera, still and video has no user control or editing abilities but still manages to take good pictures and movies.
Everything else this phone is designed to do it does very well and has many unique and useful applications. As for the "speed" of this phone, even indoors with a week signal it connects calls, accesses and loads my email or completes a GPS location in just a few seconds. considering the fact that I had to install a repeater to enable me to use the cell phone that this Samsung replaced I am very impressed with this phone. As I am writing this I accessed the Internet with my signal going back and forth from one to no bars and my home page still loaded in about 4 seconds. Thats pretty impressive when neither of my last two phones could load this same page in less than 15 seconds with my repeater turned on and showing no less than 3/4 full strength.
I won't go into every thing this phone does or all the really cool and useful apps it has as the amazon page description covers all that. I will only say two things, first if you buy this phone I guarantee you will not be disappointed, And second someone who would give this phone a one star rating obviously has ulterior motives. 15+ years designing and manufacturing handsets, don't make me laugh. So even with a bad Web interface and no camera controls this phone still rates five stars. Oh and by the way I work with the owner of one of the first ISP companies in existence, and i can tell you he is a i phone freak and after playing with my s30 for about 20 minutes he was truly jealous. |
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| | Review: Whats so Instinctive about this thing?
| The Samsung Instinct II, I dont even know how they call it that cause there is nothing instinctive about this phone at all. Its almost impossible to navigate, pages load slowly, the thing seems to always be dialing somebody whether I want it to or not, and it freezes constantly. The web browser is very difficult to manage, and messaging....well, good luck and just pray you dont accidentally switch from a qwerty keypad to an ABC format. The software is terrible and every command takes a minimum of 3 button pushes to complete. Its terrible. "End call/Are you sure/Confirm command/Done" Ridiculous.
As an aside, this phone's Bluetooth also isn't compatible with my Garmin GPS handsfree phone interface so that's another peeve.
All this I discovered after replacing a charger, then two suspect batteries but the whole ordeal ends today with a trip to a rival carrier that has 3G service in my own personal Dead Zone. BTW, level of experience: 15+ years as a designer and manufacturer of handsets, this is the worst implementation I have ever seen.
Ha! Now I see Samsung is basically giving these things away...wonder why? Dont fall for the hype or the styling, this phone is far inferior to the phone it was designed to dupe. |
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