newVideoPlayer("sprintinstinct.flv", 475, 376,""); Samsung Instinct, second pass, this time in a room with real lighting! Besides learning that it’ll come out for under US$300, we took another look at the web browser, which we weren’t super impressed with earlier, partially because its slick, headlining interface feature—panning through a website by tilting the phone up or down—was brokified. Turns out, the dark discotheque room is what nuked it, since it made it impossible for the camera to detect any movement.
Sprint’s Instinct is so special the carrier is holding its own super special event. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite finished baking, so the full feature set wasn’t entirely ready to go—we had to visit different “stations” to check out each feature individually to keep us from diving too deep. The iPhone-challenging visual voicemail, for instance, ain’t quite live. Plus, it locked up when I was messing around with the music store, and needed a hard reset for the more money shot voice command features, which still didn’t quite work (or finding a McDonald’s is just too much). And the web browser doesn’t, um, touch mobile Safari, at least not in its present state.
Samsung’s Instinct may be the best stab at the coveted title of iPhone killah this CTIA. The 3.1-inch touchscreen phone has localised haptic feedback, plus three hard navigation keys. If it sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen versions of it before, but only in Korea. Mind you, this is not the LG Prada-ripoff Samsung F480, which had a much smaller touchscreen.