Being the number 3 US Carrier and having stock prices drop by nearly 67% since June of 2007 has been hard on Sprint to say the least. Sprint Nextel Corp is going to bet it all later this year with a touch-screen phone from Samsung known as the Instinct SCH-M800. To help boost market awareness, Sprint and Samsung will spend more than $100 million in marketing to help regain their stock price and hopefully boost the company out from the trenches. During the keynote speech by CEO Dan Hesse today at CTIA, Sprint has decided that the Samsung Instinct is the future for the mobile industry and the solution for Sprint as he said the $100 million dollar marketing campaign would represent more than three times the money spent on its biggest device launch in 2007.
It’s hard to ignore the impact the iPhone has made on the market with all the touch-screen phones being launched recently as Sprint’s product commercialization director David Ownens said, “the iPhone set a bar for user interface, we wanted to have an equivalent experience.” The goal with the Samsung Instinct SCH-M800 will be to sell volume with a mid-June launch and a pricing of sub $300. The pricing structure has been aimed agressively at beating the iPhone’s $399 8GB price point, but the performance of the device will establish the true market value.
The Instinct SCH-M800 will operate much like the iPhone through finger slides over the 3 inch touch-sensitive display and have quick access to favorite features such as web surfing, video, driving directions and text-messaging. To counter the iPhone’s internal storage, Sprint will package both a memory card (size unknown) and an extra battery. The inclusion of an extra battery is probably linked to the reported 4 hours of talk time on the Samsung Instinct which is minimal in comparison to the 8 hours of talk time on the Apple iPhone.
The Instinct will use all of Sprint’s services and should bring customers closer to getting the most out of the new Unlimited Plans. We will wait for a review unit before we start analyzing the Samsung Instinct so don’t expect much criticism on our end until the facts are straight.
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