Version: BH29
Delivery: OTA
Projected Release Date: 9/17 (client initiated) 9/24 (network initiated) Projected Release Dates are best estimates and are subject to change with no notice.

Notes: Instinct firmware BH29 includes the resolution of 249 tickets open since the previous public firmware release, BF30. The release also marks the first public release of the updated Instinct Web Browser, version 1.1. The new browser is based on an entirely new codebase and brings an 10x improvement to rendering speed, most noticeable in the areas of pan/zoom/resize functionality.

New browser features include:
* VC Button -> Hide/show controls; browser controls can be hidden to provide more screen to webpage display
* Favorites enhancements -> Improvements to favorites UI allows for sticky mode lock
* 34 other web browser tickets resolved

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

AWARD-WINNING SAMSUNG INSTINCT™ AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY FROM SPRINT ON JUNE 20 FOR JUST $129.99

Revolutionary device offers industry-leading combination
of full touch-screen functionality and fast network speeds
with live TV, stereo Bluetooth, GPS with turn-by-turn navigation
and one-touch access to favorites

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – June 18, 2008 – Sprint (NYSE: S) today announced pricing for Instinct, a new wireless device that offers consumers an industry-leading user experience by combining full touch-screen functionality with the fast speeds available on the largest national mobile broadband network. When the device launches on June 20, it will cost just $129.99 with a two-year contract after a $100 mail-in rebate.

Customers will be able to purchase Instinct through Sprint retail stores, Web (www.sprint.com) and telesales (1-800-SPRINT1.) Best Buy is Sprint’s exclusive retail partner for Instinct from June 20 – August 28.

In order for customers to experience the full capabilities of the device, Instinct must be activated on a pricing plan offering unlimited data. Customers can choose from Everything plans for individuals starting at just $69.99 per month for 450 voice minutes or Talk/Message/Data Share plans for families starting at $129.99 per month for 1500 voice minutes to share between two lines. Instinct complements Sprint’s signature Simply Everything Plan offering both unlimited nationwide voice and data services for just $99.99 per month. The Simply Everything Plan offers premium services, including GPS navigation, email, web surfing, Sprint Music Premier and Sprint TV Premier, while letting customers easily budget for phone expenses.

Instinct was recently named “Best in Show” in the third annual Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Award competition in April at CTIA Wireless 2008. Instinct was also honored as “Most Innovative Product at CTIA Wireless 2008” by the editors of LAPTOP, a leading mobile technology magazine. CNET also recognized Instinct as the “Best Cell Phone” in its annual Cream of the Crop CTIA 2008 awards.

The innovative 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. Instinct has a high-tech look with large, vibrant touch-screen featuring localized tactile feedback, called haptics, which transform the virtual QWERTY keypad and other screen interactions into a sensory experience. The device also offers a Speech to Action button providing many functions using speech activation for calling, texting, picture messaging, traffic, movie, sports, news, weather and search.

As Sprint’s first EV-DO Rev A consumer-centric device, Instinct provides the ability to quickly browse the Web, access business or personal e-mail, share pictures, listen to commercial-free radio and more at broadband speeds. Instinct also provides smooth access to GPS applications including Sprint Navigation, with GPS-enabled audio and visual turn-by-turn driving directions and one-click traffic rerouting as well as Live Search for Sprint, powered by Microsoft, providing easy access to directory information on-the-go, interactive maps and one-touch click to call access.

Instinct boasts many advanced features including Visual Voicemail, allowing users to listen to messages in their order of preference and manage them with a simple tap of the screen. This device also provides support for corporate and consumer (POP3 and IMAP) email, multitasking capabilities that allow the user to play music in background mode while surfing the Internet, texting or playing games, a 2.0 megapixel camera with camcorder and expandable microSD memory of up to 8GB. Additional features include advanced stereo Bluetooth® 2.0, SMS voice and text messaging with threaded text, picture caller ID and Sprint Mobile Sync.

Instinct comes with everything the user needs to enjoy the device’s full capabilities right out of the box. Contents include a 2GB microSD™ card that can hold approximately 2,000 songs from Sprint Music Store, two standard 1,000 mAh batteries offering up to 5.75 hours of continuous talk time each, battery-charging sleeve, travel charger, USB cable, 3.5mm headphones with built-in microphone, and carry case with stylus. Customers can access the latest information on Instinct at www.instinctthephone.com.

About Sprint Nextel
Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two wireless networks serving nearly 53 million customers at the end of the first quarter 2008; industry-leading mobile data services; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. For more information, visit www.sprint.com.

[Sprint Instinct]

Despite what we and other media have hinted at, despite what Sprint itself is spending a lot of money trying to convey, the Samsung Instinct is not an iPhone killer. To be sure, Samsung and Sprint borrowed liberally from the iPhone playbook when it came to look and feel. But the comparison itself isn't fair: The iPhone is a software platform that is growing every day, soon to have a host of applications that put it squarely in the smartphone category along with BlackBerry, Palm and Windows Mobile. The Samsung Instinct will never be mistaken for a smartphone. Then what is it? It's the best carrier-centric feature phone I've ever seen, a delight to use for many—though not all—of its intended purposes.

Due to business decisions Apple and the US carriers have made, most Americans are still not faced with the choice to buy an iPhone or not. They have to pick the best "feature phone" that their carrier has to offer. That is, a phone that costs somewhere between $50 and $250, built first and foremost to make voice calls, then serve additional social purposes—messaging, photos, etc.—and, finally, offer data connectivity to the web but more importantly to e-mail.

In this array of duties, there are some where the Samsung Instinct falls flat on its kiester, but there are an unusual number of ways in which this phone makes life easier. I'll start with them, then get to the grimmer stuff:

Snappy Interface: Other touchscreen phones we've seen have annoying split-second lags. The Instinct, for the most part, does not. Some of its visuals were obviously borrowed from Apple, such as pop-up option screens, lists of settings, etc., but at the same time it has features that are original, albeit inspired by Cupertino: When a call comes in, you tap the center then slide up to accept or slide down to ignore. Hanging up is a slide from left to right. (The phone interface has other cool features, too, like "personal" call history for each of your contacts—so don't go cheatin'—and the ballyhooed visual voicemail, which unfortunately wasn't available to test at this time.) The UI only got stuck a couple of times, and never permanently. As with any other "natural" interface, it takes a few minutes to figure out the physics of the system, but once you do, it's intuitive.

Favorites: The Home button actually takes you to one of three panels, Favorites, Main and Fun. When you get the phone, the Favorites pane is blank, but you can add all kinds of stuff. As you can see up top, I've added Weather, E-mail, Alarm, Camera, Navigation and Settings, but it can get so specific, you can have a Favorites button for sending text messages to Brian Lam, cuing up your "I'm So Sad" emo song playlist, or launching Gizmodo.com. This sounds retardedly obvious, but I can't think of a carrier phone that lets you do it. Certainly not the Voyager, the Glyde, the Venus, the Rumor or any other Verizon or Sprint phone that comes to mind.

E-Mail: Feature phones most typically have bad e-mail programs, some of them hidden away where you can barely find them. The message? Do Not Use! But on the Instinct, the e-mail program is really easy to setup, with all the major webmail providers preconfigured for instant log-ins. You can put in more than one account, naturally, and easily jump from one to the next. The mail's vertically oriented view is great, with header frozen in place at the top of the screen and the message itself scrolling along with an iPhone-like flick of finger. And you are alerted to new e-mails with a blue star on the top of the phone's screen.

Web Apps: I'll get to the web browser down below (yes, in the "grim" section), but first I want to sing praises for the numerous web apps on the phone. Weather, News, Sports—your typical need-in-a-hurry information—have been organized in an attractive way that delivers maximum info with the least effort on your part. Sports in particular is amazing (and I'm not known for being a sports fan): You tap one of your pre-selected teams to see a schedule. Any game in progress will immediately show a score. Tap it and you get stats and a write-up from AP or another wire, plus other data breakdowns as necessary. Photo Viewer: Another feature with some iPhone-like traits, the photo viewer lets you finger through your images in either a grid of shots or a Cover Flow-like stream of them. Videos you shoot are in there, too. You can add photos from your computer by copying them to existing folders or, better still, creating your own folders. This means you can have a nice organized gallery of pics, separated out how you want. You don't just have to settle with looking at shots from the passable but by no means award-winning built-in 2-megapixel cam. (There's an auto upload feature too, but it has PhotoBucket and MySpace but not Flickr, Picasa or Facebook, so I'm going to ask Sprint the deal with that.)GPS Navigation: Usually, I'm down on cellphone turn-by-turn GPS navigation, but Telenav has finally gotten it right, ahead of everyone. AT&T and Sprint both use it, but this is the first time I've really been happy with it, even in areas of questionable phone coverage. It's still an iffy proposition if you're in the middle of nowhere, but it works better than any I've seen, and looks far better than Verizon's sorry also-ran, VZ Navigator. (Hint to Verizon: Ditch your white-label software provider and pay a few more bucks for Telenav.) My only complaint is that the live map itself isn't oriented horizontally, like portable GPS products are.Voice Command: This is something that the iPhone lacks, and that's a shame. I have been a fan of voice command for years, especially the stuff built by VoiceSignal (now part of Nuance, the Dragon NaturallySpeaking people). The better Samsung and Motorola phones use it, so it's no surprise to find it here, but the good news is, it works. Not only can you dial people quickly, but you can pull up a text message or picture mail ("Send picture to... Dad"). Though you still have to tap the screen a few times after you've got your message cued up, the voice command eliminates a lot of menu digging.

There are a few features that work well in most instances, but have weaknesses that shouldn't be overlooked:Touch Typing: The typing feature looks a lot like the iPhone's, only it doesn't have the pop-up letters, and doesn't let you shift letters on the fly or auto-correct. However, for some reason, when I've typed on it quickly, everything has looked good. It's like the iPhone in that sense: When you just plunge ahead, results are better. In most scenarios, you can choose whether to type horizontally with QWERTY config or vertically with letters in alphabetical order. In some cases you can even get a third option: graffiti. Yep, like the Palms of yore, the Instinct lets you scrawl in characters one at a time. I can't imagine why you would, and frankly this implementation isn't very good, but it's fun to know what's hidden beneath the surface here.

Music Player: By the look of the thing, it should be fine. It's got all the typical categories, and unlike some Sprint and Verizon phones, it was clearly designed to support your own files as well as purchases from the carrier music store (if anyone was dumb enough to buy music that way). It's a decent player, but it has a potentially fatal flaw: It can't read all MP3 tags, only most of them. That means your "All Songs" lineup will have tracks by artists you can't see under "Artists." The saddest part is that you can't fix it with any hocus pocus either on the phone or on your computer.

Video Player: At the top of the TV/Video menu, there's a "My Videos" option, where you can see stuff you've recorded or sideloaded. I dumped in four different kinds of videos, and while my .avi, .mov, and .mpg failed, the one that worked was a .mp4. It was a Postal Service video, and it looked really good. The file type gave me hope that my vast iPod/iPhone-friendly video library would also be supported, but though the files show up in the queue, they do not play. That means a buttload of time consuming file conversion for yet another device... yippee!

The semi-bungles above can be tolerated, either by working with them or just totally ignoring them. But the Instinct gets one big ole check-minus in particular:

Web Browser: I gotta say it: The Instinct's browser is an ABYSMAL failure of design. It's not that I'm surprised. Nobody has pulled off the mobile browser quite like Apple has. But for some reason, despite Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A network, the browser is slow slow slow, too slow to do much of anything. Beyond that, the interface is streamlined almost to the point of unusability. I can't figure out a way to add a current page to favorites, and zooming in and out requires a tap of a button, that increases or decreases the page—again, very slowly—to an arbitrary size. As you can see in the gallery below, it's junk, and I don't see myself using it. There are some other issues that I had with the phone: I turned off the vibration feedback, since it seemed out of sync with the visuals and was frankly just annoying. As you probably guessed, you still can't make your own songs into ringtones, and you can't even turn Sprint's Music Store songs into ringtones either (full 3MB song download for $1.99 vs. 500KB partial song download for $2.50—you do the math). The ringtone-getting process was a bitch, partly because it's based on that slow-ass browser. I mentioned the camera wasn't award-winning, and I will stress that again, though in video mode, it seemed to do the trick in most well-lit cases.

The last thing I want to mention is that the phone has an all-you-can-eat service price of $99 per month that includes EVERYTHING. That is to say, everything but song downloads and some very peripheral video-on-demand options. Most streaming vid and music is included, all data for e-mail, all messaging including video mail, unlimited use of the GPS navigation, plus unlimited talk time. I believe that's a pretty good price when you consider all of the features. The key with a plan like that is to have a phone where those features can be used. That's what the Samsung Instinct is, to me—the best feature phone option for people who don't mind playing in Sprint's walled garden of services, but don't want to feel like a chump. I've been playing with it nonstop for days now, and it continues to impress me. And while I'm no iPhone fanboy, I'm not easily impressed. Now, if only Verizon would get something this nice...

Let's start with the acronym: GPS stands for global positioning system. Originally a DARPA-funded joint project of the Air Force and Navy, this satellite network tells ya where stuff is, like bombers and cruise missiles in decades past, or you as of mid-2000 when the government made GPS of decent accuracy available for civilian electronics. (It was available before then, but wasn't good enough for reliable turn-by-turn app.) The soul of GPS is the constellation of at least 24 satellites way out in orbit. Signals from four separate birds are usually needed for a standard GPS receiver to peg your position.

The GPS goods most people are familiar with are ones you mount in your car (though like we said, GPS will fit just about anywhere now) with the biggest players being Garmin, TomTom and Magellan. They used to be a lot more expensive, but now you can get basic namebrand models for not much more than $200, and cheap knock-offs for even less.

At a basic level, these all operate the same way, with variations in feature sets and UI: Your GPS receiver picks up signals from orbiting satellites and plots your position accordingly on pre-loaded maps. (The maps themselves typically come from one of just two companies, Navteq and Tele Atlas.) More recently, live traffic info (or something close to it) to avoid the Monday jam courtesy of an overturned 18-wheeler of pig lard has been the goal, with the pricey (but awesome) Dash Express delivering the up to the minute goods via GPRS cellular connection.

While GPS has gotten better in your car and on your wrist, the real excitement is its movements into cellphones and other gadgets such as cameras for location-based services (and maybe ads) and tricks like geo-tagging. Sprint's Instinct phone, for instance, makes a big a deal out of having real GPS while the iPhone has less accurate triangulation via cellphone towers, since being accurate to within several blocks isn't nearly as helpful as knowing where you are within a couple of meters. Friend finders and kid locators are options on pretty much every carrier.

As GPS modules get smaller and less power-hungry, you can expect GPS to keep showing up in ever smaller and crazier gadgets, since it'll be cheap and easy to cram it in. Manufacturers on everything from laptops to shoes are getting in on GPS mania, so even if you never owned a GPS device, odds are, you soon will.

It's actually a pretty nifty UI feature, though it doesn't quite make up for the browser's other flaws—zooming could be much better and no portrait mode, though we're told they're working on both (pop-up keys on the keyboard might be on the way, too). We were also told that the platform will be continually evolving and show up on other Sprint devices, so at least theoretically it's only going to get better. [Instinct Coverage @ Giz]

There's no accelerometer and website viewing is landscape only (conversely, navigation is portrait only). No pinching or pulling, either, you tap a zoom button multiple times to get the level you want. Bleh. It tries to make up for being less dynamic with a mode that lets you pan through a site by moving the phone around, using the camera as the sensor. But, it didn't quite work, at least not for Giz, which loaded painfully slow, despite the 3G connection.

Haptic feedback has a lighter touch than the Voyager, though when you scroll through a list, it does this weird undulating vibration wave throughout the entire phone, which is both neat and slightly unnerving. Since it's so beta (dare I say buggy?), it's hard to gauge its true iPhone-killing potential right now, but we'll be keeping our eye on it. (Props to Dave Zatz for letting us jack his iPhone for the size-off.)

The Instinct rocks EV-DO Rev A and GPS, in both cases besting what's in the fruit phone. And then content and app wise, Sprint's own wares are basically swapped in for Apple's: Sprint Music Store, Navigation, TV, Visual Voicemail and a full HTML web browser—everything except a la carte music included in the $100 monthly subscription fee. EVERYTHING. On top of that, its customizable homescreen is amazing (and actually customizable, unlike other similar phones). You can check out all of the iPhone-like attributes in our 20-screenshot gallery. We'll be getting our fingerprints on one shortly, but in the meantime, there are more pics and hard data after the jump, uhhhh, fool. [Samsung Instinct Full Review]

More body shots:

Samsung Instinct
The Ultimate in Touch Screen Speed and Simplicity

Samsung Instinct, exclusively from Sprint, offers consumers an industry-leading user experience by combining full touch screen functionality with access to the fast speed of Sprint's EV-DO Rev A Mobile Broadband Network. Samsung Instinct provides easy access to Sprint exclusive multimedia content, business or personal email, GPS navigation, live and on-demand TV content, full song downloads, streaming radio and an impressive HTML Web experience. Samsung Instinct offers localized haptic feedback and a new level of customization by allowing the user to access their favorite applications with a single touch. This stylish handset provides an expansive touch screen display and three navigation keys that keep all of the device's features and applications within immediate access. Samsung Instinct offers Visual Voicemail, stereo Bluetooth with audible caller ID, expandable memory up to 8 GB and a 2.0MP camera with camcorder.

ENTERTAINMENT/PERSONALIZATION
Sprint TV with an extensive selection of live and on-demand programming including Sprint Exclusive Entertainment (SEE), the industry's only made-for-mobile sports and entertainment video
programming network
Sprint Music StoreSM allowing users to wirelessly download full-length songs directly to their phone for just 99 cents each
More than a dozen streaming-radio applications, including Sprint Radio with more than 150 channels
Sprint Media Manager PC to phone transfer application
Background music mode allowing the user to play music while text messaging, playing games or surfing the Internet
Customizable Favorites menu

PRODUCTIVITY
Sprint Navigation with GPS-enabled audio and visual turn-by-turn driving directions, one-click traffic rerouting and more than 10 million local listings
Live Search for Sprint, powered by Microsoft, provides easy access to directory information, integrated GPS-enabled directions, interactive maps and one-touch click to call access
Voice to Action button providing many functions using voice activation including call, text, picture messaging, traffic, movie, sports, news and search.
HTML Web browsing
Visual Voicemail allowing users to listen to messages in their order of preference and manage them with a tap of the screen
2.0 megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom and video camcorder
Advanced Stereo Bluetooth Wireless Technology with audio caller ID
Access to corporate and consumer (POP3) email including AOL, Gmail and Yahoo!
Threaded text messaging provides a view of the full conversation
Mobile Sync to restore contact information if the device is lost, stolen or damaged
Phone as Modem connects the phone with a computer for Internet and email access

SPECIFICATIONS
Dimensions: 2.17 x 4.57 x 0.49 inches; 4.4 ounces
Display: 3.1" TFT (240 x 432 pixels and 262K vibrant colors)
Standard Lithium (LiIon) battery: up to 5.75 hours continuous talk time*