We reported yesterday that Sprint would be investing 100 million in a marketing campaign for the upcoming Samsung Instinct, but today we wanted to breakdown the device features and expand on the details. The Samsung Instinct SCH-800will be the first consumer oriented device to support EVDO Rev A. Although the device will be consumer focused, it will support both business and personal email (POP3) and provide a virtual QWERTY keyboard with haptic feedback. Navigation on the Samsung Instinct will be simplified through a Voice to Action button that provides voice activation support for calls, text, picture messaging, traffic, movies, sports, news and research. The promise has been made by Sprint to deliver, “revolutionary device speeds up the user experience like no other touch-screen phone and brings the customer’s most-used applications and contacts within a single finger tap.”

• The first EVDO Rev A consumer device: 3.1 Mbps downlink (average speeds between 600 kbps and 1.4 Mbps), 1.8Mbps uplink (average speeds between 350 kbps and 500 kbps)
• 2.17 x 4.57 x 0.49 inches and 4.5 ounces
• Virtual full QWERTY keyboard with haptic feedback
• Full support for Sprint Navigation, Live Search for Sprint, Sprint TV, Sprint Exclusive Entertainment (SEE), Sprint Music Store, and Pocket Express (sports, weather, news, movies based on zip codes)
• 3 dedicated keys on the lower portion of the phone: phone, back and home keys
• 4 Menus: favorites (fully customized one touch access to things you do most), main (messaging, voicemail, gps), fun (music, tv, photos, games) and web (full HTML web browsing)
• Visual Voicemail support: listen to voicemails in any order and manage them with a single click (similar to iPhone’s visual voicemail)
• Full multi-tasking: listen to music in background mode while surfing the Internet, texting or playing games
• 2.0 megapixel camera with video recording
• microSD slot supports up to 8GB
• Bluetooth 2.0
• SMS voice and text messaging with threaded text
• Phone as Modem support
• picture caller ID
• Sprint Mobile Sync
• 5.75 hours talk time with 1000 mAmp standard battery
• What’s in the box: 2GB microSD card, two standard 1000 mAmp batteries, charging sleeve, travel charger, usb cable, 3.5 mm headphones with built in microphone, leather case, and stylus
• Release Date: June 2008

“Samsung designed the Instinct after spending years developing innovative touch-screen technology,” said Bill Ogle, Chief Marketing Officer for Samsung Mobile. “What really sets the Instinct apart is the ability to access users’ favorite features with just one touch of the device. The three navigation keys that Samsung positioned at the bottom of Instinct are instrumental in making the user experience quick and easy. Samsung feels the Instinct will increase our status as the fastest growing mobile phone manufacturer in the U.S.”

So there you have it folks, the full details of the Samsung Instinct SCH-M800. The most important features we recognized are the support for email is limited to POP3 accounts which will be a disappointment for corporate users looking for MS Exchange support for push email. With the iPhone adding MS Exchange support in June we see this as a big problem if Sprint hopes to steer corporate users away from the iPhone 2.0 purchase in June. Including threaded SMS voice and SMS text messaging is a big bonus and one of the features we find lacking on nearly every device on the market with the exception of the iPhone and devices receiving the Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrade later this summer (Out of the box devices, yes you can load your own .cab files to add threaded text support or use ExtremeText). Full support for Sprint Navigation out of the box will be a solid foundation to the Samsung Instinct and clearly a limitation of the iPhone which currently only supports the GoogleMaps My Location relative positioning through cell towers.

Samsung Instinct Fact Sheet

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