Samsung Instinct, iPhone impostor ?

Gaufire praised the iPhone for a number of reasons the gadget geeks would appreciate. Indeed, Apple must have spent a considerable amount of investment, both in the form money and time to come up with this astonishing masterpiece. The Gaufire team, as usual, tried to find something that could actually come close to the iPhone. One of the nominees actually did, in so many aspects. But to be honest, not to our liking.

Samsung seems to have come up with what we call the 'cheap-ugly-lookalike' of the Apple's revolutionary phone. Samsung calls it Instinct. Surely Samsung's 'instinct' to convince the techie's isnt good enough, because when we studied this device carefully, the word lost all meaning, and in this case, FOR THE WORSE.

With its buttonless face and black monolithic look, the all-touchscreen Instinct is immediately familiar: It's virtually the same weight and size as the iPhone, only about two-tenths of an inch narrower. Most of the expected specs for any 2008 handset are here: 3G, GPS, 2-megapixel camera (with video recording), and full e-mail and web browsing features.

Of course, the real reason for the iPhone's success is its operating system, and here the Instinct is still playing catchup. While everything is intuitive and pretty zippy, it's still not quite as polished as Apple's version. The web browser shows some terribly rough patches, a crude zoom button stands in for the iPhone's

sophisticated "pinch" system. As well, the narrower body trims nearly a half inch off the iPhone's screen size, which really cramps page size. Even typing on the Instinct can be rocky, as there's no pop-up indicator to show you what button you're actually hitting. I made so many mistakes in notes and web URLs that typing slowed to a painful crawl even by iPhone's slow standards. It got so bad I ended up using a fingernail to type instead of my fingertip.

Call quality is fair, not great, but music playback is considerably higher fidelity. Battery life is under five hours of talk time. That's not great for a smartphone, but we'll have to wait and see how it compares to the iPhone 3G in real-world testing.

The Instinct won't woo the Apple faithful from upgrading to the iPhone 3G, but it's definitely good enough to rank as a solid second-tier player in the smartphone space. If nothing else, if you have the misfortune to be locked into a long Sprint cellular plan from which you can't escape, pick up one immediately
The only thing that almost convinced us was the price tag of $130, but then being die hard iPhone enthusiasts, we obviously had to change back our minds. The iPhone in Gaufire's perspective, still is quite simply the Apple way of saying Hallelujah ..!!!