Two weeks ago, I asked Samsung Instinct owners to tell me what they thought of their phones. Normally, I don't write blogs asking for comments on individual phones after we've reviewed them, but Sprint's Instinct had me worried. While I liked the handset when I reviewed it, I know that people who use a phone long term can develop varying opinions. After I started to get e-mails from disappointed Instinct users, I began to wonder if I had it wrong. Even now, the average user score on the review almost matches my score of four stars (or 8.0), but perhaps opinions were changing over time.
After a careful review of the responses to my blog, it's clear that the Instinct is a good phone, but it falls short of a being a great phone. Of the 67 verbose and candid comments that passed the "relevancy" test (I had to discount quite a few because they were duplicate posts, comments from non-Instinct owners, flame wars, or just off topic), opinions were just about evenly spread. The largest group (39 percent) wrote that they liked the phone overall, but they didn't shy away from registering quite a few complaints. The next largest group (31 percent) was soundly positive with very few gripes, while 30 percent were strongly negative with very few praises. So even though the majority of users like the Instinct, many of them do so only begrudgingly. On the other hand, the unhappy minority is shouting at the top of their lungs.
Let me state that this wasn't a scientific study by any means. Also, while one reader warned me that there was a "concerted effort" on Sprint forums to bombard my blog with negative comments, the results are interesting nonetheless. For the most part the "likes and "dislikes" were universal. I'll list those below. Also, while I agreed with most of the complaints, and noted them in my review, there were a few gripes that didn't occur to me before. As I said, long-term use gives a fresh perspective. So now, on to the opinions (albeit in a Zagat's Survey format). … Read more
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