Samsung's not copying the iPhone, they're responding to market demands. Ah, so that's why the (distinctly iPhone-ish) Samsung Instinct got a red carpet roll-out at CTIA and a $100 million ad campaign to sell it to every man, woman and child on Earth. Good thing it's all coming off without a hitch... except for a few hitches.
No lie, Samsung's made a nice looking phone, and the Instinct is bringing an iPhoney candy bar in for under $300 retail (they're not quoting exact prices just yet). That's a fairly major achievement. It's built to run on Sprint's EV-DO Rev A broadband, packs a 2.0-megapixel camera, and has a microSD slot that takes it up to 8GB of memory. Music, email, internet, games: check.
It's also sporting a haptic feedback system - something the iPhone sorely lacks - that makes typing on the virtual keyboard much easer, though we're hearing the touch interface is a little sticky sometimes. There's also some weird things going on with the UI, like mandatory portrait views for navigation and landscape for web browsing, where the iPhone lets you switch on the fly.
Viewing a webpage has its own special trick: you tilt the phone to scroll up, down, left, right. Except the Instinct uses a camera to detect tilts, not an accelerometer, so people who initially tested it out in the dark and dangerous CTIA exhibition hall couldn't get it to scroll no matter how much they shook the stupid thing. But Gizmodo just put up a video proving it does indeed work. Under optimum lighting conditions, anyway.
The Instinct will hit the mainstream this summer, by which time Samsung's expected to hammer out the kinks. If they can do it, you're looking at an under-$300 iPhone that's not slaved to AT&T, and if anyone survives the marketing push, that could equal a RAZR-like splash. You even won't have to jailbreak it, so you'll get the full 3 Year SquareTrade warranty, and Accidental Damage coverage will be an option (not the case on unlocked phones).
We've got our fingers crossed on this one. Inexpensive coolness appeals to our cheap and fickle hearts.
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