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Samsung's new Instinct, a Sprint exclusive, was one of the most talked about mobile phones at this week's CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. Why? Because Instinct is the latest touch screen phone to have Apple's iPhone in its sights. And, it appears, Sprint and Samsung have gotten much right.

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.