The partners have been working together on Instinct for the last nine months, according to Sprint's director of product commercialization David Owens, with whom SmartPhoneToday had a chance to speak with at CTIA.

They wanted to build a handset that offers a touch-centric user interface "consistent with the iPhone", which Owen’s readily admits raised the bar for usability for everyone in the industry.

The iPhone is a high-end smartphone with a price to match that has thus far appealed mostly to the young, the well-to-do, the technically savvy and Apple loyalists. Sprint and Samsung designed Instinct with a broader range of users in mind, many of which are today's average feature phone owner.

Instinct is due to become available from Sprint in June for a far more consumer-friendly price than the iPhone of between $199 and $299. It is also more about services it enables Sprint to deliver to users out of the box.

And, whereas the iPhone's operating system is one of the most advanced ever, with huge potential for developers to create a wide variety of consumer and, eventually, business applications, Instinct runs on a proprietary platform with a Java-application layer.


Hands on with Sprint's Samsung
Instinct at CTIA Wireless 2008.

While that means their will be plenty of software available for Instinct when it launches, you won't see the same level of sophistication from third-party developers as you do now unofficially and soon will officially with the iPhone or other types of smartphones for that matter.

Be that as it may, Instinct will offer plenty the iPhone lacks:

Instinct's intial storage capacity is limited but expandable, as it sports a microSD slot for up to 8GB cards. It also includes a GPS chip to support some highly-integrated Telenav-based location-based services.

These include GPS-enabled audio and visual turn-by-turn driving directions, one-click traffic rerouting and more than 10 million local listings. A feature called Live Search provides access to directory information, GPS-enabled directions, interactive maps and one-touch click to call access.

Like the iPhone, the Instinct sports an advanced touch interface that allows your fingers to easily do the flicking and navigating on its 3.1-inch display.

Its display, which isn't multitouch and of a lower resolution than the iPhone, is based on the resistive technology most people have become accustomed to on their PDAs and smartphones over the years. Whereas the capacitive technology used in iPhone "detects a finger drawing off current from an electric field over the screen," for input, as SmartPhoneToday reader Kevin explains in the opinion section of this article. We mistakenly said heat originally.

Instinct's display is all about the push of your finger or, if you choose, bundled stylus. So, unlike the iPhone, you can successfully use Instinct's display with gloves on or when the weather is particularly cold.

The integration of haptic vibration feedback—Samsung was one of the first OEM's to adopt haptics in its phones—courtesy of technology from a company called Immersion, is a nice touch for Instinct. When I tested the Instinct's virtual keyboard, for instance, each time I touched a key, I felt a slight vibration to tell me I was successful.

There are a number of games designed for previous haptic-enabled Java phones that'll be ready to take advantage of haptics inclusion in Instinct when the phone is released in a few months.

Underneath the screen are dedicated keys marked phone, back and home. The phone key always takes the you back to essential voice calling features, such as speed dial, visual voicemail, contacts and the dial pad. The back key is a consistent way to take a step back in the operation. And the home key provides quick access to the Instinct’s four menus of functionality: favorites, main, fun and Web.

At 2.17 x 4.57 x 0.49 inches, Instinct is slightly smaller and narrower than the iPhone, which may be a major advantage for those who find the iPhone's width a little wide and uncomfortable. The material it is made of is less smooth as well. Together, this allows you get an excellent grip on Instinct.

As with the iPhone, Instinct includes a 2.0 megapixel camera (but with the ability to take video), Bluetooth, and visual voicemail. And while the iPhone's battery is not removable, to the chagrin of many users, Instinct's is. To emphasis this, Sprint is bundling two batteries in the Instinct’s package.

Instinct will be the first consumer device from Sprint to support the ultra-fast Rev. A data network, which leaves AT&T and the iPhone's tortoise-like EDGE data network in the dust. EV-DO Rev. can reach download speeds as high as 3.1 Mbps with the average transfer rates ranging between 600kbps to 1.4 Mbps. EDGE, on the other hand, averages data transfer rates of only 70 to 135 kbps.

Sprint would like to make use of EV-DO to help them differentiate Instinct through its services. "This is the device that brings these services to life more than anything else," Sprint’s Owens noted. The point, he added, is to make it as intuitive as possible to use these services; hence the name Instinct for the phone.

In addition to those mentioned earlier, supported services include Sprint TV, Sprint Exclusive Entertainment channel with made-for-mobile sports and entertainment videos, the Sprint Music Store, and Sprint TV.

Sprint will offer Instinct with its all-you-can-eat data and messaging plans.The only differentiating factor in what your monthly fee will be is the number of voice minutes you choose. So service starts at $69.99 for 450 minutes and tops out at $99.99 for those who would like to talk to their hearts content without worrying about both data and voice overage fees.

Is Instinct an iPhone killer some are claiming? I don't think so.

While we're impressed by what we've seen so far, we think it simply falls into a different category of phone. That doesn't mean Instinct doesn't have huge potential.

There are plenty of people who don't care what platform their cell phone runs on, let alone if it is labeled a smartphone. They require a simple-to-use mobile handset that offers plenty of the services and features they want at an affordable price. Instinct could fit the bill nicely.

To make sure people know it exists, Owens said Sprint is launching its biggest advertising campaign ever, larger than previous ones by a factor of three, to support Instinct's launch. After all, as Owens pointed out, all the press the iPhone received leading up to its much-hyped release last June resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in free publicity for Apple. If it wants anything comparable for Instinct, Sprint knows it'll have to generate the publicity itself.

See next page for more images of Instinct.