You’ve got to feel a little sorry for the folks at Samsung and Sprint Nextel. Last Friday, they launched a feature-rich, appealing and generously priced $130 smartphone called Instinct, yet all anyone wants to gab about is the new iPhone coming July 11 from Apple and AT&T.

Instinct invites the inevitable comparisons to its iconic rival. Instinct and iPhone kind of resemble each other. And both run off their respective carriers’ fastest cellular networks.

Moreover, it may be an iPhone wannabe, but Instinct boasts features the iPhone doesn’t offer. These include mobile radio and TV services, voice dialing, stereo Bluetooth, expandable memory, a camera that shoots video and a removable battery. Heck, Sprint even tosses in a spare, which you can charge outside the phone.

One more thing Sprint supplies that Apple doesn’t: a carrying case that in hindsight I should have used. Its touch-screen got a nasty scratch after I carried it unprotected in my pocket during tests

in Manhattan, northern New Jersey and South Florida.

All that indeed makes Instinct a worthy rival to the iPhone, even whether it falls short. Apple’s software is more intuitive and pleasurable. The iPhone makes beautiful use of an “accelerometer” for orienting the screen horizontally or vertically depending on what you are doing. With Instinct, there doesn’t always seem to be a rhyme or reason for when you must rotate the device.

Moreover, even with a Web browser capable of showing the real deal Web rather than pages optimized for mobile viewing, the experience pales next to iPhone. Ditto for e-mail.

Here’s closer look:

*The basic Instinct. At 4.4 ounces and just by 4 1/2 inches tall, 2 inches wide and a half-inch thick, Instinct is close physically to the iPhone. Its 3.1-inch display is a little smaller than Apple’s, however, and of a lesser resolution.

Three main touch controls…

Orginal post by Top Tech News