We sure have seen some innovative and interesting technology emerge this summer.

But you know what we really need?

A transmogrifier.

After getting hands-on time with both the Samsung Instinct offered by Sprint and the iPhone 3G offered by AT&T, I must say that both are highly intriguing devices.

Each performs various functions better than any other phone we've tried. And each falls short of expectations in a few other areas.

If only we could place both phones inside a truly fantastical high-tech advance, press a button and....boom! Morph them into a single device, drawing on the best features of each.

That's clearly not the approach Sprint and other carriers are taking, choosing instead to position their devices as potential iPhone killers.

Here are a few points we considered in our own head-to-head match-up between the Instinct and the iPhone.

As far as the Instinct goes, its GPS-driven turn-by-turn directions is a winner. Voice commands direct you exactly where you need to go, even politely but insistently telling you when you have gone off track. The iPhone has directions, but it doesn't seem to compute a change to a route while on the fly, it requires a finger flick to advance to the next step in the directions and it doesn't guide you with a voice command.

Both offer touch screen keyboards, but I have to give the edge to the Instinct on this, as well. The tiny vibration that registers each screen touch provides just enough feedback to improve the typing accuracy and ease of use. While using the iPhone, I often found myself wanting the haptic response built into the Instinct.

A streamlined design with a single button is an Apple hallmark. Steve Jobs truly is a visionary when it comes to these matters. But I often found myself wanting the "back" button available on the Instinct while I was using the iPhone.

A colleague weighed his choices between the Instinct and the iPhone this summer. A Sprint customer, he went ahead and bought the Instinct. But after a weekend, he regretted his decision. The problem?

The Web browser.

For all of the advances and cool stuff available on the Instinct through Sprint, the Web-browsing experience pales in comparison to the experience offered by Apple and it's iPhone. Surfing the 'Net on an iPhone reproduces the experience on a computer much more closely than on any phone I have ever used.

Sometimes the experience was a bit slow, but generally more than acceptable. It even provided a decent experience during a trip to Manhattan -- the Little Apple in Kansas instead of the one in New York -- when I didn't have access to a 3G network. Many more Web pages are configured to display well on the iPhone. On the Instinct, many Web pages were more cumbersome to navigate.

On this, the Iphone is the big winner.

The vaunted App Store available through Apple is reason to give additional consideration to the iPhone. Sprint offers a rich menu of multi-media possibilities, though, so this is not necessarily a deal-killer.

Consumers must factor in the quality of the network coverage. It appears the much-discussed problems recently have involved a hardware issue with Apple's phone, but AT&T's network is not blameless in the views of some observers.

Consumers also must weigh the calling plans available through Sprint and AT&T. We might take a deeper dive into this issue specifically at a later time.

So, until we get a real-world transmogrifier, consumers are going to have to pick one phone.

The Instinct clearly allows Sprint to be part of the wireless conversation, a point Sprint executives made when discussing their second-quarter performance earlier this summer. While it is not perfect by any means, the iPhone comes closer to offering more of the attractive features and easy-to-use functions that many data-consuming wireless subscribers are likely to find appealing.

And I reach this conclusion not just because of the Super Monkeyball capabilities of the iPhone. It's almost mind-blowing to tilt the iPhone all around and see the virtual monkey in a ball respond to the real-world physical commands of the player guiding it along various platforms.

I don't necessarily want to give away the ending, but it's safe to say that we are not the first to reach a similar conclusion about the Instinct vs. the iPhone. Submitted by Jason Gertzen on August 21, 2008 - 8:34am.
 | login or register to post comments | report this post to an admin