I came across Samsung’s promotional site for its Instinct phone on the Sprint network (I’m sorry, make that the Now Network) and was quite impressed with the advertising campaign (what they refer to as “the greatest product placement of all time”). The site starts out with a movie-trailer-like introduction in full screen, but with minimal visuals – black screen with text and animation of a phone. It looks great, but I didn’t have any trouble loading it. I have a Comcast connection at home, but I don’t think our wireless router is the best so I have trouble streaming audio and video sometimes.
The Instinct clips seemed to play pretty well on my computer though. The quality also seemed pretty good. Once you get into the site (past the humming helicopters and the sonic booms that go off every time you mouse over something) you get to where you can play clips from “as seen in the movie,” otherwise known as commercials, you can look at the features of the Instinct and you can compare the Instinct and iPhone. All of these use flash movie clips. There is quite a bit going on while the clip is buffering, which distracts the viewer from the fact that they are actually waiting for a movie. I like the percentage circle that you can watch go around to 100%. There is also some animation built into the Flash player itself and it moves while the movie is loading, further reassuring the viewer that something is happening and that the movie will play momentarily. Also, while the video is buffering, other parts of the flash screen are still active and you can still make noises by running your mouse over the screen.
The quality of the video is good, but I’m most impressed with the audio. They really tried to make the audio sound like you’re in a movie theater with surround sound. The player uses a simple, but effective skin that has a play/pause button and a “share video” button. There is also a progress bar that can be moved around.
Toward the end of the Instinct “movie” my connection became much slower (maybe Comcast decided I had used enough bandwidth for the evening) and I had to wait about a minute for things to load rather than the 5 seconds it had taken earlier, but when things did finally load I only had a couple clips skip.
I like the convergence of Flash effects and video at this site and I don’t know that there is much I would do differently. They even make it easy to share the video by embedding, posting to facebook, myspace, digg or sharing the url.
For those of you who want to get past all the “product placement” there’s also a user forum on the site. Two weeks after the phone’s release it sounds like there are plenty of unhappy customers who want a better browser, but most of them seem willing to give Sprint a chance to come up with updates to solve the problems. But I think Sprint better act fast.
Digital Media 