I recently came across a review by Walt Mossberg of the Sprint/Samsung Instinct. I’ve admired Mossberg for years, and always found his reviews to be insightful, but his review of the Instinct was a disappointment on many levels.
First, Mossberg spends most of his time (in both a blog post and video review) lauding the yet-to-be-released iPhone 3G. While the Instinct is clearly positioned as a iPhone competitor, I think a product review should focus on the merits of product under review. That review can include a comparison of a market-leading product, but in my view, it’s bad form for the entire review to be such a comparison.
Mossberg, by writing his review entirely in the context of the 3G iPhone, misses several strong selling points for the Instinct including:
- GPS with turn-by-turn directions,
- Streaming media (TV and radio)
- Voice Command for local GPS-assisted search and voice dialing
- Ability to shoot and playback digital video
The Instict also gives users software for transferring music, photos and videos from a pc to the Instinct. Mossberg dismisses the Instict’s digital music playing features, saying they are incompatible with Apple’s format. Isn’t every other media player on Earth incompatible with Apple’s format?
You can read Mossberg’s review on Allthingsd.com and watch is video below:
