THE new Samsung Instinct is a blatant iPhone wannabe, but its software structure is simple and it has its own personality, declares David Pogue in his State of the Art column in The New York Times. The Instinct does not succeed in surpassing the iPhone, especially the new one — but it does succeed as a smartphone, he says. It is a wee bit taller and thicker than the iPhone, but noticeably narrower (2.2 x 4.6 x 0.5 inches). Beneath the 3.1-inch touch screen are three glowing, flush-mounted buttons: Phone, Home and Back. That Back button is refreshing, since moving from one software spot to another on the iPhone generally requires pressing Home and drilling down again from the very top.The Instinct's most gimmicky enhancement is a so-called haptic touch screen, which means that the whole thing vibrates a little each time you tap it. The phone works the way the iPhone does: tap someone's name in Contacts to dial, tap Answer or Ignore when a call comes in, and so on. Even what Apple calls Visual Voicemail is here — the brilliant feature that displays your voicemail messages in a list, like e-mail, so you can listen in any order (and avoid the 15 seconds of exposition. “You. Have. Seven. Messages. ...”). If you have a Gmail, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo account, setting up your e-mail is as simple as entering your name and password. You can open, but not edit, some attachments, like JPEG pictures, MP3 music files and Word documents (minus formatting). The good news from Pogue: On the Instinct, you can always rotate the on-screen keyboard 90 degrees, the wide way, making the keys much bigger targets. The bad news: the Instinct's software isn't nearly as sophisticated as the iPhone's. It makes no effort to save keystrokes by predicting what you're typing, and when it notices a typo, its suggestions are practically idiotic. (You type “tymes,” it suggests “funds.”) The iPhone shows complete, fully formatted Web pages on that vast expanse of screen. But the Instinct doesn't even come close, for two reasons. First, you're peeking at the Web through a smaller keyhole; the Instinct's 240 by 432 pixel screen size is dwarfed by the iPhone screen (320 by 480). That's compounded by the second problem: the Instinct doesn't have a multitouch screen. So you can't smoothly zoom in and out of Web pages (or photos, or e-mail attachments) by pinching with two fingers, as on the iPhone. Nor can you enlarge a single chunk of a Web page — a single photo or sidebar box, for example — with a double tap. Instead, the Instinct offers only three zoom settings: full size, double size and half size, and the result is a touch of BlackBerry claustrophobia.For some people, the Instinct's entertainment features may make up for these weaknesses. There's music playback, of course, and access to the service provider's online music store, if any. However, none of it is as polished or pleasant as the iTunes/iPhone system, but it gets the job done. Other features included access to radio stations and TV channels. Then there's the highly refined G.P.S. feature complete with voice prompts. From a feature-count perspective, the Instinct whops the iPhone. It has all of the now-standard smartphone features — calendar, calculator, alarm clock and game demos. And its cup runneth over with features unavailable on the iPhone, like navigation, TV, radio, a swappable battery, video recording, picture messages and voice dialing. But three things are missing from the Instinct. First, it lacks the iPhone's ability to access Wi-Fi wireless hot spots. Second, there's nothing like the iPhone App Store, an online repository of add-on programs — games, music keyboards, tools nobody has even imagined — that you can download directly to the phone. Finally, the Instinct is missing that Applesque essence of polish, perfectionism and fun. __
