The parade of iPhone lookalikes continues. Soon after Apple announced the first iPhone a year ago, factories in Asia, at the behest of U.S. phone carriers, were asked to respond to the sleek, touch-screen device. Some have reached the United States; more are coming.
The latest is the Samsung Instinct, introduced by Sprint on June 20. While it isn't a bad phone and has features the Apple product lacks, it is no match for the iPhone. The manufacturers have not replicated the iPhone's greatest strength: beautiful, powerful, breakthrough software.
Also, the timing of the Instinct is unfortunate. It was designed to go up against the first iPhone. Sprint has a Web site (nowisgood.com) comparing the two devices. But the Instinct went on sale three weeks before Apple and AT&T started selling the new 3G iPhone. This second iPhone model corrects some of the first model's main weaknesses, wiping out advantages Sprint hoped the Instinct would have.
Before getting into the details of the Instinct, a few words about the new iPhone, its main competition. I don't do full reviews of products until I have tested them extensively, but my first impressions of the 3G iPhone are largely positive.
The price of the new iPhone's base model, which comes with 8 gigabytes of memory, is $199, a 50 percent price cut from the comparable first-generation model. Yet, it now works on AT&T's fastest data network, promising anywhere from two to five times the speed of its predecessor. It also has GPS for tracking your location and fully supports over-the-air synchronization of email, contacts and calendars - through Microsoft Exchange in corporations or via a similar new consumer service from Apple called MobileMe. And you will be able to download directly to the phone a whole universe of third-party programs, from productivity software to games.
On the downside, the new iPhone's camera remains very basic and still cannot capture video. For people who prefer physical keyboards, the iPhone will still fall short. It continues to include only a virtual onscreen keyboard. And the iPhone remains locked to a single carrier in the United States, AT&T, which will charge $10 more per month for unlimited data consumption on the device.
The iPhone, along with some competitors such as the BlackBerry, are really handheld computers that happen to make voice calls. And they are getting more powerful and innovative. So far, competitors including the Instinct, while trying to look like iPhones, are still mainly voice devices with so-so computing features tacked on.
