Right before I got back from Virginia, I noticed that the touchscreen on the Samsung Instinct I’d been using for the last 21 months was no longer responding to my touches. Frustrated, I went through the steps to alleviate any glitchy behavior; rebooting the phone, popping out the battery, putting it on its charger, but to no avail, my phone was not working properly. I couldn’t help but notice a water / moisture spot on the screen, and rubbing it did nothing; somehow, it was underneath the screen, how it go there, I had no idea, but I was resigned to blaming the problems on it.

I carefully lifted the transparent safety screen off of the phone, and equally carefully wiped away the spot. I gingerly applied the screen back onto the hardware, and lo and behold, key strokes began responding again. Upon initial diagnosis, everything seemed to be working fine; except for the small nuance that anything at the top 1/10th of the screen was registering low – in other words, trying to push “2” on the numeric keypad would result in “5” being entered. Finding this behavior unacceptable, I proceeded to perform surgery on my phone again.

This was not a good idea. Somewhere along the line, I severed some foil-thin circuitry, and the phone would no longer register any key strokes, unless I was pushing into the depths of Hades into the top-left corner of the physical phone itself, where the severed circuitry likely occurred.

Long story short – this was not the first and only time I have been frustrated with the Instinct, as with the ushering of the next generation of Android phones, it has been more or less abandoned by Sprint and Samsung themselves, and has suffered a litany of inconsistencies, poor performance, and problems that are clearly not going to be fixed any time soon. The dead touchscreen was the final straw, and I decided to cut my losses, and re-up for two more years with Sprint, and I am now one of the few privileged techno-geeks to have acquired an HTC Evo4G. Seriously, as far as Best Buys are concerned, this was the last one in all of Metro Atlanta.

So for lack of a better term, good riddance to the Samsung Instinct, onto the future with my Evo. It is a little melancholy, because I have had Samsung phones, supporting the motherland for the last nine years, and this is the first time I will have a phone of a different maker. Unfortunately, poor performance is poor performance, and loyalty can’t be expected to continue with it in tow. However, things weren’t always bitter and upsetting with the Instinct – it definitely has seen a good share of good times in the 21 months that I had it, and I’ve been wise enough to capture a lot of it on its diminutive 1.3MP built-in camera.

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