The Samsung Instinct, coming from Sprint on June 20, is modeled after the more obvious aspects of the iPhone’s design. Like the iPhone, the Instinct is black with a rounded metal trim and offers a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. Both include a Home button bottom-center, a row of icons, a grid of icons, a status bar, and a microphone centered at the top.
The likeness largly ends there.
It’s fascinating to see how Samsung studied the iPhone, yet missed so much of what makes it lovely. Let’s compare the two, noting some of those details the iPhone gets right that the Instinct doesn’t.
There are no logos on the the iPhone’s face. The Instinct includes Samsung’s wordmark above the screen and Sprint’s wordmark and logo below. Both wordmarks are larger than any other text on the device. Their inclusion affects aesthetics, obviously, but usability too: when you look at the status bar your eye will keep moving up to the Samsung wordmark. On the iPhone, the status bar is the top of the visual area, above which lies enough blackness to stop the eye; on the Instinct, the Samsung logo lies at the top of the visual area. You couldn’t pick a better spot if you wanted to emphasize the Samsung name, but this little inclusion makes it just a little more Samsung’s device, and a little less yours.
The iPhone’s Home button is the sole target below the screen. It’s a horizontally centered circular depression you can feel when you touch it. This is good, since the thumb you use to hit that button is large and relatively clumsy. The Instinct places a Back button to the Home button’s left, and a Phone button to its right. This compromises the usefulness of this area, since you can no longer just click below the screen to go Home—you have to aim, too. Aim a little left or right and you’ll be confused and probably annoyed. These two buttons compromise your ability to use the Home button with motor memory alone and force you to use it cognitively as well. That’s bound to slow you down, and bound to cause mistakes.
The iPhone’s Home button is black and contains a white rounded rectangle that echoes the shapes of the iPhone’s icons and the iPhone itself. The white rounded rectangle is small and abstract and doesn’t attract the eye, just a hint of white in an otherwise completely black area large enough to rest your thumb on while using the device. The Instinct’s Home button is a flat icon of a house whose odd proportions make it look a little like a thatched hut. Though there’s a bit of room to rest your thumb in the generous Spring wordmark area above these buttons, that area is compromised by being squeezed by screen and buttons. Move your thumb a little and you’ll trigger something you didn’t intend to.
The three buttons on the Samsung are unfortunate when taken as a set. Their white icons are bright and large enough to attract the eye. They are visually asymmetric.
The iPhone’s status bar elements are carefully grouped and nicely balanced: signal strength for carrier and wi-fi on the left, state icons like battery and Bluetooth on the right, and the time in the middle. The Instinct’s status bar elements look jumbled together, and there’s no element in the center. The iPhone is elegant in part because the Home button, status bar time display, and microphone draw a subtle and horizontally symmetric line. There is no such symmetry on the Instinct.
The iPhone renders text beautifully. The labels beneath the bottom four buttons for Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod are a brighter white than the labels beneath the icons in the grid above. The crispness with which these labels are rendered permits a smaller font size without sacrificing legibility. The Instinct’s text is by comparison harsh and difficult to read. The font is displayed with an exaggerated y-height, while the kerning is painfully tight. A glance at the time displays in the status bar is enough to see this difference. The iPhone’s display has visual integrity; the Instinct’s does not.
The iPhone’s icons use color boldly to convey purpose and function. Their rounded rectangles echo the device’s shape as a whole. Their images fill these rectangles, simplifying the negative space of the blackness behind them. The Instinct’s icons use color timidly and without apparent guiding purpose. Their irregular images create complicated negative spaces intensified by glowing borders and dropshadows. Where the iPhone’s icons appear serene, the Instinct’s icons appear disheveled.
The iPhone’s icons float in a grid of soothing blackness, obvious but implied. The Instinct’s icons lie fixed in a grid emphasized with border lines, gradients, and shadows. The result is considerable visual noise in precisely the area where the user would benefit from clarity.
There are more details than these that the iPhone gets right and the Instinct doesn’t, but that’s enough. Some details like text rendering would be hard for Samsung to fix but most would be easier, making it particularly puzzling how anyone would copy the iPhone so obviously while missing what makes it shine.
What makes the iPhone shine must not be so obvious after all. Or, if obvious, not so easy to copy. And that’s just the static visual elements of the device and the Home screen.
