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If you’re one of the 37,467,199 people sick of hearing the media talk about “iPhone killers”, then take heart in the fact that there’s one less such device that’ll be talked about in the press from this point forward. Today is a big day for Samsung and Sprint as they released the much-ballyhooed Samsung Instinct 3 weeks ahead of the iPhone 3G.

As has been said numerous times in as many places, the Instinct isn’t really an iPhone killer, but it’s a darn good feature phone. The touchscreen worked pretty well during my brief hands-on with the Instinct today, with only a few “misses”, notably while web browsing, where you’ll find a couple instances of itty bitty teeny weeny “cancel” buttons (an ‘x’ inside a circle) that are so small that guys like me with big fingers will have a tough, if not impossible, time accurately hitting them.

The web browser wasn’t as bad as I’d heard it was, although if there was an option to view a website in a mode that would fit it, horizontally, to the width of the Instinct’s browser, I didn’t see it. That would have been a nice thing to add, Samsung.

The Instinct’s haptic feedback is pretty nice, and something that other touchscreen phones will probably all include someday…the screen vibrates just a little bit at the point where you touch it to give you a smidge of tactile feedback. Pretty cool, especially if you’re one of those people who gets all out of sorts when you touch something and it doesn’t respond.

Call quality was decent, and about the same as other phones that have an internal antenna on the Sprint network. The Sprint TV was, to be honest, dreadful. I mean, it actually was a pretty short wait from when I clicked on a “channel” to when the video started playing, and the video streamed fine, but the image quality is laughable at best, with what looked like a 120×90 resolution and, oh, I dunno, 6 or 7 seven colors. Maybe.

But the Instinct would be a great phone for anybody bound to Sprint or who, for whatever reason, isn’t interested in the iPhone. I can see some people wanting a different phone, for instance if they really want a physical keyboard, but for $129 (with a 2-year contract), the Instinct is a pretty sexy touchscreen phone with a lot of decent, but not perfect, features.