Although there's no shortage of iClone like devices here at CTIA 2008, we have yet to find a legitimate competitor to Jobsian's Jesus phone.
That was until we spent time with the Instinct.
The touchscreen sporting, haptic feedback having, CDMA networking phone produced by Samsung and offered exclusively by Sprint was shown to us all quick and dirty like in a darkened room just off the show floor in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
It's still half baked in a lot of ways. (The projected release date is sometime in June.) Visual voice mail did not quite work and the integrated Web browser is not nearly as polished as the iPhone's. Still, there are some awesome aspects to the device. Namely the haptic feedback on the 3.5-inch screen is responsive — but not irritating like in the LG Voyager. The operating system is slick and easy to get around in. We never got lost in a maze of folders. Using your thumb to select on icons seems to work better than index fingers. The 2-megapixel camera is, well, a 2-megapixel camera. The few images we snapped had decent image quality with true colors. It's not remotely close to super camera phones like the LG Viewty in terms of image quality. We'll have a little more on that particular phone in an upcoming post though.
The Instinct should (and probably will) sell like crack injected hotcakes. The fact that a good many technophiles are locked into Sprint contracts or actually want high speed data access from their mobile devices virtually ensures high demand for the Instinct. Oh and you better believe the G-Lab will have a review device once Samsung irons out all the wrinkles in the device.
For more pics by our intrepid photographer, Issac Brekken, hit the jump
Oh shit, all I have is this one picture of the phone's menu from a bird's eye view. We'll have a massive gallery of more phones for you guys tomorrow. Pinkie swear.
