Favorites: The Home button actually takes you to one of three panels, Favorites, Main and Fun. When you get the phone, the Favorites pane is blank, but you can add all kinds of stuff. As you can see up top, I've added Weather, E-mail, Alarm, Camera, Navigation and Settings, but it can get so specific, you can have a Favorites button for sending text messages to Brian Lam, cuing up your "I'm So Sad" emo song playlist, or launching Gizmodo.com. This sounds retardedly obvious, but I can't think of a carrier phone that lets you do it. Certainly not the Voyager, the Glyde, the Venus, the Rumor or any other Verizon or Sprint phone that comes to mind.
E-Mail: Feature phones most typically have bad e-mail programs, some of them hidden away where you can barely find them. The message? Do Not Use! But on the Instinct, the e-mail program is really easy to setup, with all the major webmail providers preconfigured for instant log-ins. You can put in more than one account, naturally, and easily jump from one to the next. The mail's vertically oriented view is great, with header frozen in place at the top of the screen and the message itself scrolling along with an iPhone-like flick of finger. And you are alerted to new e-mails with a blue star on the top of the phone's screen.
Web Apps: I'll get to the web browser down below (yes, in the "grim" section), but first I want to sing praises for the numerous web apps on the phone. Weather, News, Sports—your typical need-in-a-hurry information—have been organized in an attractive way that delivers maximum info with the least effort on your part. Sports in particular is amazing (and I'm not known for being a sports fan): You tap one of your pre-selected teams to see a schedule. Any game in progress will immediately show a score. Tap it and you get stats and a write-up from AP or another wire, plus other data breakdowns as necessary.
Photo Viewer: Another feature with some iPhone-like traits, the photo viewer lets you finger through your images in either a grid of shots or a Cover Flow-like stream of them. Videos you shoot are in there, too. You can add photos from your computer by copying them to existing folders or, better still, creating your own folders. This means you can have a nice organized gallery of pics, separated out how you want. You don't just have to settle with looking at shots from the passable but by no means award-winning built-in 2-megapixel cam. (There's an auto upload feature too, but it has PhotoBucket and MySpace but not Flickr, Picasa or Facebook, so I'm going to ask Sprint the deal with that.)
GPS Navigation: Usually, I'm down on cellphone turn-by-turn GPS navigation, but Telenav has finally gotten it right, ahead of everyone. AT&T and Sprint both use it, but this is the first time I've really been happy with it, even in areas of questionable phone coverage. It's still an iffy proposition if you're in the middle of nowhere, but it works better than any I've seen, and looks far better than Verizon's sorry also-ran, VZ Navigator. (Hint to Verizon: Ditch your white-label software provider and pay a few more bucks for Telenav.) My only complaint is that the live map itself isn't oriented horizontally, like portable GPS products are.
Voice Command: This is something that the iPhone lacks, and that's a shame. I have been a fan of voice command for years, especially the stuff built by VoiceSignal (now part of Nuance, the Dragon NaturallySpeaking people). The better Samsung and Motorola phones use it, so it's no surprise to find it here, but the good news is, it works. Not only can you dial people quickly, but you can pull up a text message or picture mail ("Send picture to... Dad"). Though you still have to tap the screen a few times after you've got your message cued up, the voice command eliminates a lot of menu digging.
Touch Typing: The typing feature looks a lot like the iPhone's, only it doesn't have the pop-up letters, and doesn't let you shift letters on the fly or auto-correct. However, for some reason, when I've typed on it quickly, everything has looked good. It's like the iPhone in that sense: When you just plunge ahead, results are better. In most scenarios, you can choose whether to type horizontally with QWERTY config or vertically with letters in alphabetical order. In some cases you can even get a third option: graffiti. Yep, like the Palms of yore, the Instinct lets you scrawl in characters one at a time. I can't imagine why you would, and frankly this implementation isn't very good, but it's fun to know what's hidden beneath the surface here.