Samsung Instinct appears to be full of fail
Coming from a snark on John Gruber's site about Samsung's instinct going head to head with the iPhone in a hundred million dollar advertising campaign, I find the Gizmodo article with videos of the two phones side by side. And I have to say what the hell are they smoking in Sprint and Samsung too for that matter?
Maybe I've misunderstood this, but the selling points of the Samsung Instinct are that it has 3G and GPS built in. Like the next version of the iPhone which is supposed to be coming Real Soon Now(tm) is expected to have.
Maybe I'm biased because I'm looking at this with the eyes of a European where our mobile phone infrastructure isn't made entirely out of second hand string and tin cans like it appears to be the case in the USA, but while 3G is important I just don't get boasting about it. Next you'll be telling me that my car comes with tyres or an engine. By all means tell me why yours is special, if it really is, but don't expect me to drool uncontrollably just because you've got one at all.
And let's not forget the adverts that commit the cardinal sin of putting your product next to a competitor's when your product might have slightly better technical chops, for a couple of months maybe, but ultimately looks like crap. And besides that, I think anyone who is that impressed by how the phone looks will already have an iPhone with a contract tied to it, and those of us who are impressed by features more than looks will already have a different phone (here's mine) that does far more than either the Apple or Samsung phone already. So who's left? People who want an iPhone but are too stupid to notice that the one they picked up feels funny and says "Samsung" instead of "Apple" on the casing?
I think John Gruber is right. If I had an extra hundred million dollars to spend on making people buy my mobile phones, I think I'd spend it on building a phone so damn good that I don't need advertising because people besiege my stores to buy the phone anyway. Or I'd wonder who was going to be buying luxury mobile phones during the onset of a recession and save my damn money for a rainy day.