Samsung is a a well known and highly respected company in the electronics industry as a whole. They make high quality HDTV’s, phones, and even digital cameras. They are well known in the mobile space for their extremely stylish and functional cellular phones. They make an extremely wide variety of phones, but their most interesting phone currently is the Samsung Instinct, their competitor to the iPhone.
Samsung also makes a nice variety of advanced texting phones with QWERTY keyboards built in. Clearly this is a company that gets that typing texts using a numeric pad is like torture. It takes forever and it just not intuitive, no matter how you try and slice it. Read more…
admin Articles, Stickies cell phone, cellular phones, instinct, Propel, Samsung
Samsung has released another firmware update for the popular Instinct, and it seems to be a good one. According to Gizmodo, the update includes some major enhancements to the browser. The browser seems to to be the achilles heel of most phones (just ask my wife about her BlackJack), so it’s nice to see them working hard to make this one better.
They claim a 10x improvment in rendering speed, which must be a stunning improvement for people that are used to the old one.
In addition, you can now hide the browser controls (to give you more screen real estate), the favorites UI has been improved, and there have been 34 other browser-related tickets closed. Not bad!
admin Browsers, Samsung, Software browser, firmware, instinct, Samsung, update
More than a year after Apple introduced it with the iPhone, and some months after Sprint lauched it with the Instinct, Verizon has finally brought visual voicemail to one of their phones.
At the current time it only works with the revamped LG Voyager, known as the Voyager Refresh. However, it’s expected to arrive on other phones very soon — maybe the Dare?
admin Software, Verizon Apple, instinct, iphone, lg dare, Sprint, Verizon, visual voicemail, voyager, voyager refresh
The very popular Samsung Instinct has just received a firmware update. To update your phone, go to:
[Menu] –> [Settings] –> [General] and choose “Update phone”.
The update has a few nice tweaks:
- Increased audio volume when using Bluetooth.
- More stable signal and battery bars.
- Allows you to set a saved image as your wallpaper.
- Allows recurring events in the calendar.
- Various improvements to the web browser.
They also announced that a more signficant update was coming later in the year, but they haven’t revealed what that might include.
If you have an Instinct, what do you think of this update? Worth getting?
admin Samsung, Software firmware, instinct, Samsung
According to PHONE Magazine, the very iPhone-ish Samsung Instinct is set to launch on June 20.
It looks to be a solid phone — fast EV-DO Rev. A connection, true GPS and lots of touch-screen goodness. No word yet on pricing.
admin Hardware, Samsung instinct, Samsung
One of the neatest features introduced by the iPhone was visual voicemail — tap your way through your voicemails onscreen, rather than having to press 2, then press 7, then press 4, etc. Certainly a useful way to manage them.
Klausner Technologies owns a few patents on visual voicemail, and has previously filed a lawsuit against Apple. Sprint decided to simply pay Klausner the necessary licensing fee for the technology, and will introduce it when the Samsung Instinct comes out.
It can be assumed that the visual voicemail system on the Instinct will be similar to the system on the iPhone, but no one can say for sure. The instinct is expected to ship in June for around $200-$275.
The next step will be to add something like Spinvox to this, which converts voicemails into text. It’d be nice to see a list of voicemails in your phone (visual voicemail), be able to read each of them (Spinvox), and then choose to listen to them if the text translation wasn’t clear. I keep hoping Jott might get into the voicemail-to-text game as well, because their speech-to-text recognition is pretty solid.
admin Apple, Sprint Apple, instinct, iphone, jott, klausner, spinvox, Sprint
