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Getting a three-week jump on the second-generation of its inspiration, Instinct by Samsung goes on sale at Sprint stores nationwide Friday, June 20, for $129.99.

Samsung and Sprint think they have an iPhone-killer on their hands, for $70 less than the coming iPhone 3G. Samsung will be putting its money where its beliefs are, investing $100 million in marketing and advertising.

What's the big deal? While it closely resembles iPhone features-wise and physically – it's hard for any fully touchscreen phone not to – Instinct offers myriad bells and whistles not available on the current iPhone and some not even on the pending Apple 3G version. The biggest difference is Instinct's localized haptics – a tactile feedback under your finger after touching a screen icon simulating a physical button push.

Technically, Instinct has a 3.1-inch touchscreen and is Sprint's first EV-DO Rev. A phone, offering a slight data speed boost (2.4 mbps vs. 3.1 mbps) over plain old EV-DO. Because of the faster 3G Rev. A speeds, Samsung has eschewed WiFi in Instinct. Instinct's A-GPS adds directions to an address in your contact list from where you are and supplies weather conditions and forecasts based on your location, and provides vocal turn-by-turn directions. It also has an iPhone-like gyroscope that senses in what position you're holding the phone.

Instinct also will be the first Sprint phone with visual voicemail – choose the message you want to hear from a list rather than listening to all of them in sequence, as well as threaded chat and direct photo upload to Flickr or Facebook.

More pedantically, Instinct includes a 2 MP camera, full IMAP and POP3 email and supports Microsoft Exchange, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and an HTML browser from a company called Telica. And, of course, you have speedy access to all of Sprint's music and video services.

There's things missing from the Instinct, however. There's no integrated on-board memory, for instance – you'll have to spend more to get a high-capacity SD card, and you're limited to 8 GB. You get a pre-loaded 2 GB card, however, and a second battery and separate charger are included.

Instinct plan pricing starts at $69.99/month for 450 voice minutes or talk/message/data minutes, or Sprint's Simply Everything Plan, unlimited nationwide voice and data services for $99.99/month.

We're playing with an Instinct now and we'll have a full report before the iPhone goes on sale.

Labels: cellphones