Sprint to Sell IPhone-Like Device

LAS VEGAS — Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday said it is betting heavily on a touch-screen phone that appears to be the closest thing the U.S. market has seen to Apple Inc.'s vaunted iPhone.

The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price, Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cell-phone industry trade show in Las Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the $399 for the cheapest iPhone.

Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product introduction, according to David Owens, the company's director of devices.

Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of the functions are accessed by touching the screen.

A few touch-screen phones appeared on the U.S. market last holiday season, after the iPhone's debut in June.

Verizon Wireless launched the LG Voyager, which has an exterior touch screen and folds out to reveal a non-touch screen paired with a keyboard. Sprint introduced the Touch by HTC, a slim pad with only a touch screen.

Both phones were hampered by the lack of software designed specifically for a touch screen. The Voyager dealt with that by adding a keyboard. The Touch grafted some touch-friendly features on to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile operating system, which is designed for smart phones that either lack a touch screen or are intended for use with a stylus. Some functions on the Touch are hard or impossible to use by tapping with the fingers alone.

The Instinct is based on a Samsung phone that's already available under different names, and with different software, in South Korea and Europe. Sprint commissioned its own software from European design house Icon Mobile.

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"We took a more active part than we ever have" in a phone's development, Owens said. "This was designed from the ground up to be a touch-screen phone."

The software is based on Java, a commonly used programming language that should make it easy to develop applications for the phone.

The Instinct will have a few features the iPhone lacks. For one, it will be the first consumer phone in the U.S. to use EV-DO Rev. A, the fastest cellular broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.

AT&T Inc. has phones that use a competing technology with equivalent speeds, but the iPhone is not one of them: It runs on a comparatively slow network, supplemented by Wi-Fi access.

The Instinct also contains a Global Positioning System chip, for location applications. The iPhone lacks one, but it can use cellular and Wi-Fi signals to determine an approximate position.

The Instinct's screen measures 3.1 inches diagonally, compared with the iPhone's 3.5 inches.

The Instinct won't be able to take input from more than one finger at a time: The iPhone's characteristic "pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in" feature won't work. Sprint compensates for this by using the phone's motion sensor. In a demonstration of a prototype, tilting the phone while holding a button made a Web page scroll.

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On the Net:

http://www.sprint.com

http://www.apple.com/iphone

Comments

[Sundialsvc4]

In my humble... The key issue for these devices is going to be, in the long run, not simply their appearance but the technology behind them. The iPhone, of course, runs on OS/X (Unix) and is thereby able to leverage everything that "Unix" is able to do. We know that a Linux-based system is also in the works, which will have similar leverage.

A better-interface to "a phone" is always going to sell, at least for a while longer, but in the longer view we're really looking at a fundamental technology-advance here. The iPhone, and every device that MUST(!) compete with it, is "a portable computer, not just a phone." We can naturally expect that transition to occur in market stages, but inevitably it will occur.