Samsung Instinct Video Preview

As mentioned before, the Samsung Instinct is what we'd expect the child of an iPhone and the HTC Touch to look like. With more time to fool around with the phone, we noticed that the touch screen does seem to be a bit better than the Touch, and is about the same as the LG Prada. The haptic feedback is definitely a nice feature, though it's nowhere near as good as the localized vibrations seen on the Motorola ROKR E8. In any case, the touch screen is worse than the iPhone's, but better than a Windows Mobile phone.

Though the interface is not necessarily an iPhone knock-off, we will say it certainly seems influenced by the Apple device. We did think GPS integration with software opens up interesting possibilities. Also, threaded SMS messages should help bring the readability of a chatlog to texting. We also thought the ability to assign a voice tag to applications was an interesting feature.

We thought the live preview on the camera was really bad, blurring with the slightest motion. We're not sure how the "Blurry picture!" warning could discern between a good picture and a bad one. To be fair, the preview took up the whole screen, and might not be entirely indicative of the final image. We'll leave the concrete answers to our testing.

All in all, the Instinct could be tweaked before launch to be a true iPhone competitor. This prototype's interface was a bit clunkier, and probably wouldn't compare favorably to the iPhone.


If you'd like, you can also check out some screen shots, or our short video of the phone in action.