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At Crunchgear they have been working with Samsung’s new “iPhone Killer”, the Instinct, for a few weeks now and have weighed in with their review and a whole bunch of pictures.

The verdict…well, a mixed bag. They were happy with the overall look and feel of the device as well as the price and they LOVED the haptic response, where you get a little tactile feedback (much like a vibration) when you touch the screen. I would tend to agree with them that that is a long overdue feature. One of my longstanding problems with touchscreens is the fact that they feel dead. Anyone who touchtypes well, or like me just hunts and pecks REALLY damn fast, knows that when you miss a stroke you feel it long before see it and can make corrections on the fly without having to really “see” the error. You just KNOW you made it so you backspace and continue. That sort of ability is even more important when trying to work quickly on tiny keyboards under lots of pressure (trust me, I know). You lose all that with touchscreens so I lose a lot of speed and accuracy. It is like typing on linoleum.

Other areas of the phone that they were not happy with seem to me to be deal breakers. Poor virtual keyboard, no syncing to a PC or Outlook, limited to 600 contacts….these are not going to please business users. So are they going for comsumers? According to Crunchgear, the browsing experience is horrible and the plastic screen is easily scratched (not fingerprinted, but SCRATCHED, as in “Whoa dude you wrecked your phone, man”), so they won’t cut much ice in that market either. So who are they going for as a target market? Sounds like just people who can’t get an iPhone and will settle for something along the same lines. Not exactly a recipe for wild success but it may get them through the long summer.

Here is how Crunchgear summed it up…

Bottom line? This is a good, if flawed phone. Most importantly, the browser needs a complete overhaul and the next generation needs a glass screen. As it stands, however, this $200 iPhone competitor is quite compelling. If you are on Sprint, this is the closest you’ll get to a truly intuitive phone with enough horsepower to download TV, audio, and video on the go. It is not a dream come true – yet – but it is a start. It is up to Sprint and Samsung to upgrade this phone with regularity, adding features that business folks need – Outlook sync for one – and a better browser for everyone else.

However, the haptic feedback is a great new addition to a phone’s bag of tricks, and hopefully we will see it in more models soon…or Samsung corrects their faulty Instinct.

Zealot (444 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).