“The latest to arrive is the Samsung Instinct, to be introduced by Sprint on June 20. I’ve been testing the Instinct, and while it isn’t a bad phone and has some features the Apple product lacks, it’s no match for the iPhone,” Mossberg reports. “The manufacturers haven’t replicated the iPhone’s greatest strength: beautiful, powerful, breakthrough software.”
MacDailyNews Take: Samsung’s Instinct doesn’t even offer Wi-Fi. Yes, you read that right.
Mossberg continues, “I don’t do full reviews of products until I have tested them extensively, but my first impressions of the 3G iPhone are largely positive. The price of the new iPhone’s base model, which comes with 8 gigabytes of memory, is $199, a 50% price cut from the comparable first-generation model. Yet, it now works on AT&T’s fastest data network, promising anywhere from two to five times the speed of its predecessor. It also has GPS for tracking your location, and fully supports over-the-air synchronization of email, contacts and calendars — through Microsoft Exchange in corporations or via a similar new consumer service from Apple called MobileMe. And you’ll be able to download directly to the phone a whole universe of third-party programs, from productivity software to games.”
“While the Instinct is a touch-screen device, it lacks the iPhone’s ‘multi-touch’ system, which includes features that recognize multiple fingers and gestures, and allows actions like shrinking a photo by ‘pinching’ it. The touch system on the Instinct is more like that on an ancient ATM than a cutting-edge gadget,” Mossberg reports. “…Physically, the Instinct looks a lot like the iPhone — a dark slab without a physical keyboard or many buttons dominated by a large screen. It’s a bit longer and thicker than the iPhone, but a tad narrower and lighter. Its screen is smaller than the iPhone’s and has lower resolution… [The Instinct also] comes with just one-quarter of the memory the base iPhone includes… It’s no iPhone.”
Read the full review here.
Samsung and Sprint should be ashamed. As our own SteveJack wrote back in April: “It’s the same old, same old in an iPhone-inspired wrapper… You can judge the distance behind and overall cluelessness of iPhone’s future roadkill by the amount they copy the iPhone’s exterior… The question I’m left with for [all] of these companies rolling out imitation iPhones this year is: Exactly how stupid do you think your customers are?”