I had the instinct, then I went to this phone. I felt as though I gave the instinct more than a fair chance. I had it from August 20th to November 11th, and in that time, I've never been more frustrated with a device in all my life.
A few features the Instinct has that I miss:
- Wide screen for watching my movies
- Live search's auto GPS for finding stuff closest to where you are at the moment. (Windows mobile has live search, but with manual gps entry. You can select previous locations from a drop down list though, so it actually works out better after a few searches from around your area.)
- Visual Voicemail
- Candy bar shape. (tp is thicker, but feels better in the hand.)
Now don't get me wrong, watching movies on the Instinct was great because of it's native 16:9 screen, but with the VGA screen on the touch pro, you can make out the details just as easy, and any video in 4:3 is much bigger. It has a youtube app that works great, and since all the videos are in 4:3 it fills the screen. Sprint TV WORKS also!!! The Instinct's TV NEVER worked, from day one to the last day I used it, I never got to watch a single thing on the Instinct's TV app. The Sprint TV app makes use of the accelerometer also, so you can flip the phone however way you want it.
The main thing I gained with the touch pro was reliability. The Instinct just had too many random problems; Voicemail would go down for no reason, news weather and sports would suddenly give me error messages, TV never worked (as mentioned before), random lockups & random black screens each requiring to take the battery out, crappy browser with "out of memory" errors constantly or sites that locked the phone up (although after mr4 update opera mobile aparently runs on it) and finally, APPS!!!!
What ever happened with the app contest Sprint had for the Instinct? They either got some really crappy submissions or not enough because out of nowhere they just decide to cancel it, a week after the winner was supposed to be announced. With the touch pro you get windows mobile 6.1 pro, and with windows mobile, you get APPS!!! ALOT of free apps. One of the coolest things I found for free was MusicID which is the exact same thing as shazam on iphone (identifies music from listening to it.) I use it all the time with the radio in my car.
Here's the bottom line: The touch pro was not oriented around entertainment, but rather productivity. It just happens that you can get a lot of entertainment out of it, while having a really nice phone in the process. If you want games, a thumb friendly interface like the instinct, and apps, the iphone is your best bet.
edit:
Oh I just wanted to add, the touch pro and diamond both come with an equalizer, so your mp3's sound great. Compared to the Instinct, mp3s are just phenomenal sounding.