The Sprint Instinct was talked about a lot during CTIA this year. This is supposedly the closest thing to an “iphone killer” of any of the products according to many of the CTIA attendees. The Instinct is a nice device, it has a full touch screen with built in haptic response. I like the idea of the haptic response keys on a phone, especially if your driving and you find that it’s difficult to take your eyes off the road. The Instinct sports three huge lit-up buttons below the touch screen. I personally think these buttons look tacky, especially the back button, but I do understand why they are there (I guess).

The navigation interface is simple enough to use, the buttons are large easy to see. I especially like the “favorites screen” which has it’s own button on the main menu in the software interface.  I use my phone to check email, voice mail, and occasionally make calls so it would be nice to have these primary functions all in one place, it’s easy to add new items as well and take items away from the favorites screen.

In messaging mode I like the full QWERTY keyboard (though over time I’m not sure how much I would appreciate it as I like my standard sized keyboard)

There seemed to be some glitches using the phone, for example the speed by which the phone searched for local business listings and getting into text mode was a bit clunky (I know it’s beta so I wont say too much). The phone also will allow for live television streaming and radio, along with full HTML web browsing.

Overall this seems like a nice product but I don’t think it’s an iphone killer, at least in the beta preview I saw.  It doesn’t have the visual appeal or the originality that the iphone does. While I certainly think competition is good, especially in a space such as mobile technology, I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about here. My “instinct” tells me Sprint has more work to do!