An Imitator That Rivals the iPhone

The story so far: Apple introduced the iPhone a year ago, and has sold six million of them. Then on Monday, Apple unveiled an improved model that brings faster Internet, G.P.S. and a much lower price to an already well-designed device.

Now, this new iPhone won’t be available until July 11. So this is not a review of the iPhone — not exactly.

The new iPhone will offer many goodies, but it continues to omit some standard features that a lot of people consider important: removable battery, memory-card expansion slot, video recording, voice dialing and the ability to send pictures to another cellphone. Oh, and the option to escape AT&T, which is nobody’s favorite cell company.

In other words, a certain population still awaits something that offers the touch-screen joy of an iPhone without those limitations. Oh, there have been efforts, but just slapping a touch screen onto a phone does not make it an iPhone. It’s all about the software, kids.

Samsung

Here comes one more. On June 20, Sprint will offer the new Samsung Instinct. It, too, is a blatant iPhone wannabe, but its software structure is simple and it has its own personality. It does not succeed in surpassing the iPhone, especially the new one — but it does succeed as a smartphone.

The Instinct is tentatively priced at $200 with a two-year contract and a $100 rebate. It’s a wee bit taller and thicker than the iPhone, but noticeably narrower (2.2 x 4.6 x 0.5 inches).

Beneath the 3.1-inch touch screen are three glowing, flush-mounted buttons: Phone, Home and Back. That Back button is refreshing, since moving from one software spot to another on the iPhone generally requires pressing Home and drilling down again from the very top.

The Instinct’s most gimmicky enhancement is a so-called haptic touch screen, which means that the whole thing vibrates a little each time you tap it.

To expand the puny 32 megabytes of built-in memory, you can insert a MicroSD card — in fact, Sprint provides a 2-gigabyte card with the phone. And as though to rub Apple’s nose in the swappable-battery feature, Sprint also includes a second battery and an external charger. Each charge, Sprint says, supplies 5.8 hours of talk time.

The phone works the way the iPhone does: tap someone’s name in Contacts to dial, tap Answer or Ignore when a call comes in, and so on. Even what Apple (and now Sprint) calls Visual Voicemail is here — the brilliant feature that displays your voicemail messages in a list, like e-mail, so you can listen in any order (and avoid the 15 seconds of exposition. “You. Have. Seven. Messages. ...”).

If you have a Gmail, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo account, setting up your e-mail is as simple as entering your name and password. You can open, but not edit, some attachments, like JPEG pictures, MP3 music files and Word documents (minus formatting).

The good news: On the Instinct, you can always rotate the on-screen keyboard 90 degrees, the wide way, making the keys much bigger targets. The bad news: the Instinct’s software isn’t nearly as sophisticated as the iPhone’s. It makes no effort to save keystrokes by predicting what you’re typing, and when it notices a typo, its suggestions are practically idiotic. (You type “tymes,” it suggests “funds.”) If you find iPhone typing slow going, you’ll really bog down on the Instinct. (There’s a one-word-at-a-time handwriting recognition mode, too, but it’s so inaccurate that it’s nearly worthless.)

The iPhone shows complete, fully formatted Web pages on that vast expanse of screen. But the Instinct doesn’t even come close, for two reasons.

First, you’re peeking at the Web through a smaller keyhole; the Instinct’s 240 by 432 pixel screen size is dwarfed by the iPhone screen (320 by 480).

That’s compounded by the second problem: the Instinct doesn’t have a multitouch screen. So you can’t smoothly zoom in and out of Web pages (or photos, or e-mail attachments) by pinching with two fingers, as on the iPhone. Nor can you enlarge a single chunk of a Web page — a single photo or sidebar box, for example — with a double tap. Instead, the Instinct offers only three zoom settings: full size, double size and half size, and the result is a touch of BlackBerry claustrophobia.

CONTINUED: Lacking the iPhone's polish, but still quality

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