Apr
2
If you are looking for an iPhone alternative, check out Sprint’s Samsung Instinct.
According to the Associated Press story Sprint to Sell IPhone-Like Device by Peter Svensson..
Apr 1, 2:32 PM (ET) – LAS VEGAS (AP) – Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday said it is betting heavily on a touch-screen phone that appears to be the closest thing the U.S. market has seen to Apple Inc.’s vaunted iPhone.
The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price, Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cell-phone industry trade show in Las Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the $399 for the cheapest iPhone.
Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product introduction, according to David Owens, the company’s director of devices.
Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of the functions are accessed by touching the screen.
The Instinct is based on a Samsung phone that’s already available under different names, and with different software, in South Korea and Europe. Sprint commissioned its own software from European design house Icon Mobile.
The software is based on Java, a commonly used programming language that should make it easy to develop applications for the phone.
The Instinct will have a few features the iPhone lacks. For one, it will be the first consumer phone in the U.S. to use EV-DO Rev. A, the fastest cellular broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.
AT&T Inc. (ATT) has phones that use a competing technology with equivalent speeds, but the iPhone is not one of them: It runs on a comparatively slow network, supplemented by Wi-Fi access.
The Instinct also contains a Global Positioning System chip, for location applications. The iPhone lacks one, but it can use cellular and Wi-Fi signals to determine an approximate position.
The Instinct’s screen measures 3.1 inches diagonally, compared with the iPhone’s 3.5 inches.
The Instinct won’t be able to take input from more than one finger at a time: The iPhone’s characteristic “pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in” feature won’t work. Sprint compensates for this by using the phone’s motion sensor. In a demonstration of a prototype, tilting the phone while holding a button made a Web page scroll.
