Just got word that Sprint’s new flagship wonderphone, the Samsung Instinct, will only cost $129.99, not $199 as was previously thought. That’s after a $100 mail-in rebate and with a new two-year contract, of course, but that’s a very good price for such a fully-featured phone.
The Instinct will launch this Friday, the 20th, and requires one of Sprint’s unlimited data plans, which start at $69.99 per month (includes 450 voice minutes, too).
Phonenews has the scoop on the Instinct’s pricing and that $200 price tag definitely competes against the 8GB iPhone 3G. It has a retail price of $449, but you can obtain a $150 with a 2-year plan and just to sweeten the deal, Sprint is adding on another $100 MIR just for the Instinct. Just like the iPhone 3G, you’ll have to tack on one of Sprint’s pricier plans, but it’s still a great price for a great phone. Look for our review on Friday.
Unlike our delivery woes with the Flip Mino, the Samsung Instinct for Sprint arrived at the NYC CrunchGear office this morning as expected. I’ve been impressed with this phone from the first time I saw it under NDA many months ago. The packaging is nice, but I think all packaging is a waste of money and resources. The Instinct comes with a gaggle of accessories that include: the device, headset, USB cable, case, Sandisk 2GB microSD, an extra battery, travel charger, separate USB charger, stylus, and a microSD to SD adapter. We’ll be putting the Instinct through the normal CG paces in the coming days and we’ll have a full review shortly. In the meantime enjoy the photos. You’ll have to excuse the shoddy composition, but you know how quickly we need to get these things up to beat the other guys.
I’m going to say one thing for Sprint: they’re selling the Instinct with some aplomb and intelligence. By taking entire pages from the iPhone playbook, they’re basically building buzz around the only alternative to Cupertino’s greatest I’ve seen all year. They kind of dorked out in the beginning with their GPS video but this one is pretty good. I mean it’s nothing new — phones have had speech recognition for years. But how many of us have used it?
Whenever a new device launches, there tends to be an unspoken battle amongst all of the sites to get the best unboxing shots up before anyone else. It’s madness.
Well, it looks like some Sprint employee has beaten everyone to the punch by about 2 1/2 weeks. Josh33_unc over at SprintUsers was treated to an unboxing gallery via a series of MMS sent by a buddy at Sprint, and he was cool enough to share the goods.
Regardless of these shots, everyone will still be rushing to get ultra-hi-res unboxing shots from 400 different angles in as many lighting environments as possible come June 20th. It’ll still be madness.
Check out the full unboxing
I like the Instinct. Biggs likes the Instinct. However, Sprint doesn’t seem to like the Instinct because of the cheesy comparison videos they continue to put up on their site. Must everything be compared to the iPhone? Really? Did the memo about the iPhone 2 not make its way around the Sprint advertising department? Almost every video comparison will become moot next month. Pull your heads out.
Sprint is getting ready for the fight of its life with the Samsung Instinct. While I actually like the Instinct, they’re trying to take Stevie head on, which is probably not a good idea. Generally, however, these videos are pretty cute and it’s nice to know CDMA folks can get themselves some iPhone-alikeness… unless the 3G iPhone is CDMA.
Sprint has a long row to hoe here. The Instinct is a strong phone with a great new interface, so I have no problem with it. However, doing a head-to-head against everyone’s favorite big hunk of chrome is going to be rough, especially as reviews come in. At least they’re being funny about it.
Sprint’s Instinct is supposed to be one of the better iPhone pretenders. Biggs lauded its user interface while simultaneously panning other n’er do wells for their haphazard use of haptic or multitouch-for-multitouch’s sake. So you would think the phone, which is, nearest I can tell, one of the standouts at this year’s CTIA, would have more than a handful of column inches devoted to it.
Doesn’t appear to be the case, a Lexis Nexis (Academic) search reveals.
Compare it to the iPhone, which was officially unveiled January 9, 2007 at MacWorld. Within 24 hours, as the screenshot above shows, some 409 articles, press releases and the like mention “iPhone” in the Nexis database (under the US Newspapers and Wires category).
The Instinct, 24 hours after its April 1, 2008 debut, has a grand total of 16 articles. Twenty-five times fewer articles in the same time frame.
Yesterday we weren’t able to provide you with video of the Instinct’s Web browser due to an older model without a data plan, but we found one that did and here it is for your viewing pleasure.
Here it is, folks, the Sprint Instinct by Samsung in all its glory. This particular device is running on an older version of the OS so it’s a little wonky. The number its activated with is also sans data plan, sooooo yeah.
The juicy phone from CTIA that’s getting all the hot press so far today is the Samsung Instinct for Sprint, the phone our own John Biggs said could rival the iPhone itself. That’s tough talk, but what do the numbers show?
Let’s break down what we know about each phone and lay the specs side by side and see if the feature-rich Instinct is any match for the game-changing iPhone.
Bad lighting and a bad photographer equal less than perfect photos. I’ll grab some more time with the Instinct later on and will have video up as well.
When I first saw the Instinct a few weeks ago I said “Finally.” Finally, someone, somewhere, has created an interface and a device that follows the spirit and ease-of-use of the iPhone without resorting to wholesale mimicry. Samsung built the UI from the ground up with data convergence in mind and their focus and efforts paid off. Everything in this phone — all of the contact data and information — can be used in almost all of the applications. It has built-in GPS and Sprint TV as well as Microsoft Live Search. But, thankfully, it doesn’t run Windows Mobile. Read More
