Sprint launched a promotional site for the Instinct today, www.instinctthephone.com (warning, tons of Flash video) and promptly scared hundreds of customers. I mean, what is with the Jason Vorhees-looking character in the background of this page?

Other than that, it is a decent site. Lots of product videos (taking a cue from Apple) and a few fake movie-promo videos (yes, I can see the GPS video is where the Instinct Slasher comes from).   Surpisingly enough they are continuing to use all of the “Instinct vs. iPhone” campaign videos, even though the iPhone 3G now competes squarely with broadband Internet and GPS capabilities.

The fact that the entire site is a big Flash mess means visitors can’t copy a URL directly to specific pages. At least for most of the videos they include a “send to friend” feature. You also have to wait for all of the snazzy interstitial and loading graphics every time you change screens. What a pain. You can embed the clips on your site though:

(I’m especially enjoying the use of Web surfing in the car and distracting the driver. Probably won’t be any legislation about that coming soon…)

One final fault to discuss is the “Instinct Insight” support site for the phone. Sprint links to it from the Instinct promo site, but nothing is there.  Just a fancy slideshow about what features may be there some day…which wouldn’t be much to talk about if it weren’t for this telling line on the site.