First impressions of Sprint’s new iPhone competitor from Samsung

Ok, that subhead was mostly search engine fodder. The new Samsung Instinct isn’t really going to compete with the iPhone Classic or the upcoming 3G version, for a lot of different reasons. As a part of an elite group of early adopters, consisting of “everyone who visited Sprint’s website and signed up ahead of time,” I was able to pick one up on June 19, a day before the rest of the world. By Saturday, I had managed to gum up the email (more on that later), spend 2 hours on the phone with Sprint technical support (three levels of escalation, very sincere attempts to straighten it out, but ultimately no success), and finally take it back to the Sprint store for a hard reset.

Sounds sort of discouraging, doesn’t it?

Well, I have to tell you that now that it’s straightened out, I can recommend this phone with no reservations. I have a somewhat adversarial relationship with telephones in general, and mobile phones in particular, and my main requirement from a phone is, oddly enough, that it works well for voice communications. My previous phone, an LG-325, served me well for three years, and barring a big leap in functionality, I couldn’t see ‘upgrading’ to something else just for the sake of newness. The Instinct provides that big leap, combining a bunch of useful features in a way that’s easy to use, without the “Swiss Army Knife” effect, where all the tools are better than nothing, but only just barely.

As I mentioned before, the Instinct will inevitably be compared to Apple’s offering, so I might as well go through the similarities and differences right off the bat. Like the iPhone, the interface is primarily through a touch screen, but in place of the single button, the Instinct has three; an arrow, a little house, and a phone handset. These ‘hard keys’ take you back a step, to your main page, and to the phone menu, respectively - handy to get back to where you want to go quickly, without having to page through multiple screens. Unlike the iPhone, it has a replaceable battery, and you get two of them in the box, along with a separate charger module so you can keep the spare topped up while it’s out of the phone. There’s no user-accessible internal memory; instead, photos, music, and what have you are all stored on a removable MicroSD card. A 2-gig card ships with the Instinct, but it will accept up to an 8 gig card, and of course, storage is effectively infinite if you have enough cards. The Instinct has a dedicated camera button, that both puts the phone into photo mode and acts as a shutter release, and it’s conveniently placed about where you’d expect it to be on a point-and-shoot. Speaking of the camera, the Instinct’s 2 megapixel unit also functions as a video recorder, but don’t expect miracles in either still or video mode. After all, there’s only so much in the way of optics you can stick into something this small.

The other button the iPhone lacks is the voice command key, which I haven’t had a chance to play with at all yet, so I will have to reserve judgement for its usefulness until I have a little experience under my belt. The final big difference in the interface is the “localized haptic feedback” when the touchscreen is used. This is a fancy way of describing a sensation that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a video game with a rumble pack in the controller. Tap a button on the screen, and you get a reassuring little thump in return. Scroll through a list of contacts, and the Instinct thrums happily, then gives a distinct thunk when you hit the end of the list. It’s natural and satisfying to use in the same way that a good “clicky” computer keyboard is, and the few gaps in the interface where it doesn’t give you that feedback are immediately noticeable.

As far as features are concerned, the Instinct adds one genuinely important capability that the iPhone fanboys will have to wait for until the 3G hits - true GPS navigation. I’ve been considering a standalone GPS for my car, but frankly the Instinct makes one redundant. In addition to a keyword search for the times when you know where you’re going, the Instinct also offers category choices for things like restaurants, gas stations (with pricing!), airports, and much more, making it easy to find what you’re looking for without a lot of messing around. In addition to routing by shortest distance or least time, the Instinct can also give you pedestrian routes, and in areas where the freeways are monitored (and almost all of my SoCal stomping grounds are), it will also give real-time traffic alerts. Friday morning on the way in to work, as soon as I fired up the navigation system I learned that there was an accident on the I-5, and while the Instinct could have routed me around the slowdown with a single tap, I could also see that the traffic had only slowed to 30mph, and would only add an estimated six minutes to the trip. In my opinion, the navigation capability is reason enough to covet the Instinct, and I can’t wait to use it out-of-town.

Messaging is another strong point on the Instinct, thanks to the touch screen. Like the iPhone, the Instinct is best used in landscape mode when thumb-typing, but there’s no position sensor to automatically switch from upright ABC to landscape QWERTY. Fortunately, a single tap does the job, and even with my chubby 95th percentile thumbs, I find it pretty easy to type quickly and accurately. For the truly masochistic, there’s also a handwriting recognition mode (and a tiny stylus, for which there is no storage slot). Conversations with a particular contact are shown in a threaded display that makes it easy to follow both sides. Email support is also robust, and it’s very, very simple to add existing web-based accounts like AOL, Gmail, and Hotmail. POP accounts are also supported, and there’s an application you can download to your Windows desktop that will allow the Instinct to act like a remote terminal. This is where I got into trouble - while trying to get my work email set up, I managed to paint myself into a corner that wouldn’t allow me to do anything other than get failed connection notices. As I mentioned, a reset to the ‘as delivered’ programming got me back to where I wanted to be.

The Instinct uses Sprint’s EVDO high speed data network, with no WiFi support. For email and integral data functions, you’ll never miss it, but in my admittedly short experience, browsing the web on the Instinct is no substitute for a laptop. The screen is small, and you have to be pretty patient to get what you want from it, but again, I will withhold judgement until I have more of a chance to mess with it.

Finally, the bottom line, and the main reason why the Instinct won’t compete directly with the iPhone. With a 2 year contract, the Instinct costs just $130 after rebates, undercutting Apple by a large margin. Sprint’s “Simply Everything” plan is a requirement, in either the unlimited-voice, $99 a month variation, or a $69 version that offers unlimited text and data, but only 450 minutes of talk time per billing period. At these price points, it’s hard to see why a Sprint customer wouldn’t go with an Instinct, unless they had very specific needs or a bare minimum budget. For that, we can thank Apple - if the Instinct had come out before the iPhone, it would be a $300 proposition even with a subsidy from Sprint, no doubt. But the bar has been raised, and if you can’t do it significantly better than they boys from Cupertino, you better damn well do it cheaper…