The latest to arrive is the Samsung Instinct, to be introduced by Sprint (S) on June 20. I’ve been testing the Instinct, and while it isn’t a bad phone and has some features the Apple product lacks, it’s no match for the iPhone. The manufacturers haven’t replicated the iPhone’s greatest strength: beautiful, powerful, breakthrough software.

Samsung Instinct

Also, the timing of the Instinct is unfortunate. It was designed to go up against the first iPhone. Sprint even has a Web site (nowisgood.com) comparing the two devices. But the Instinct will go on sale only three weeks before Apple and AT&T (T) start selling the new 3G iPhone, the second-generation model announced earlier this week. This second iPhone model corrects some of the first model’s main weaknesses, wiping out some advantages Sprint hoped the Instinct would have.

Before getting into the details of the Instinct, a few words about the new iPhone, its main competition. I don’t do full reviews of products until I have tested them extensively, but my first impressions of the 3G iPhone are largely positive.

The price of the new iPhone’s base model, which comes with 8 gigabytes of memory, is $199, a 50% price cut from the comparable first-generation model. Yet, it now works on AT&T’s fastest data network, promising anywhere from two to five times the speed of its predecessor. It also has GPS for tracking your location, and fully supports over-the-air synchronization of email, contacts and calendars — through Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange in corporations or via a similar new consumer service from Apple called MobileMe. And you’ll be able to download directly to the phone a whole universe of third-party programs, from productivity software to games.

On the downside, the new iPhone’s camera remains very basic and still can’t capture video. For people who prefer physical keyboards, the iPhone will still fall short. It continues to include only a virtual onscreen keyboard. And the iPhone remains locked to a single carrier in the U.S., AT&T, which will charge $10 more per month for unlimited data consumption on the device.

The iPhone, along with some competitors like the BlackBerry, are really hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls. And they’re getting more powerful and innovative. So far, competitors like the Instinct, while trying to look like iPhones, are still mainly voice devices with so-so computing features tacked on.

For instance, while the Instinct is a touch-screen device, it lacks the iPhone’s “multi-touch” system, which includes features that recognize multiple fingers and gestures, and allows actions like shrinking a photo by “pinching” it. The touch system on the Instinct is more like that on an ancient ATM than a cutting-edge gadget, even though it has a gimmicky feedback mechanism that gives you a tiny vibration-jolt when you press an icon.

Physically, the Instinct looks a lot like the iPhone — a dark slab without a physical keyboard or many buttons dominated by a large screen. It’s a bit longer and thicker than the iPhone, but a tad narrower and lighter. Its screen is smaller than the iPhone’s and has lower resolution.

The Instinct has the same $199 price tag as the new iPhone, after a rebate and with a two-year contract. Service plans are likely to start at around $70, in line with the minimum monthly fee AT&T will charge on the new iPhone. But it comes with just one-quarter of the memory the base iPhone includes.

Like the 3G iPhone, the Instinct runs on a fast cellular network that promises speeds similar to what people get with slow home DSL service. In my tests, it seemed to deliver this promised speed. It also has GPS and navigation. But, unlike the iPhone, the Instinct lacks Wi-Fi wireless networking, which can often be faster than the cellphone networks or available where there is no speedy cellphone coverage.

The Instinct has a removable battery, something the iPhone lacks. And Sprint claims 5.7 hours of talk time on one charge, more than the five hours that Apple claims for its 3G model. Sprint’s new baby has a few other features that even the latest iPhone omits, such as a built-in service for viewing TV shows and a voice-command system.

But I found its email system and Web browser to be less sophisticated than the iPhone’s or the BlackBerry’s. I also thought the phone’s onscreen keyboard was harder to use than Apple’s. It would flip unpredictably from landscape to portrait mode. The Instinct does allow handwriting recognition as an alternative, something the iPhone doesn’t.

If you’re a devoted Sprint customer, or want to avoid AT&T, the Instinct is an OK choice. But it’s no iPhone.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms such as Garmin (GRMN) and Magellan. Like them, it uses GPS satellite signals to locate your car on an easily seen map, and to route you to destinations and places of interest, using both visual and spoken instructions.

But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express, from a Silicon Valley start-up called Dash Navigation, becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. Each device not only receives and displays information, but transmits it as well, acting as a “probe,” as Dash calls it, to measure local traffic speeds. This information is compiled by the company and then broadcast back to all other Dash units in your area, almost instantly painting streets on your map with color codes to indicate traffic speeds.

I’ve been testing a Dash Express in and around my home base of Washington, D.C., and, while it isn’t perfect, I like it a lot. If the company sells enough units to create a solid network, Dash could radically improve in-car navigation.

That “if” is the big catch with Dash — in order to get its special benefits, enough units must be sold in your city to feed the network with sufficient traffic data. According to the company, for most cities just “several hundred” units would be enough to provide more than half of the significant traffic data it requires for major roads during normal commuting hours.

Meanwhile, Dash, like some of its competitors, makes use of limited traffic data provided by a commercial vendor. This information, which mainly covers major highways, is presented as a dotted line on the Dash maps, to indicate that it may be stale. By contrast, fresh input from Dash’s own network is presented as a solid line.

For the next 30 days, the Dash Express will be available exclusively at Amazon.com (AMZN) for $399.99. You get three free months of Dash’s service, including traffic and other features, such as wireless map updates. After that, the service costs between $9.99 and $12.99 a month. That fee includes the cost of the Internet connection used by the Dash Express, which is achieved using both cellphone and Wi-Fi networks.

To test the Dash, I had to create a tiny two-car network. My colleague Katie Boehret and I each drove the same route in Dash-equipped cars, about 15 minutes apart. The route included everything from the smallest residential streets to large local commuter arteries to the jammed Washington Beltway.

Katie went first, and by the time I retraced her route, my Dash unit’s screen was ablaze with solid-color streets indicating the traffic speeds she had encountered: green for free-flowing traffic, yellow for moderate congestion, red for stop-and-go conditions. Even two-lane local roads, the kind where traffic data are almost never available, were colored in.

Once Dash begins selling, the company won’t rely much on the information provided by a single driver like we did. It will average and weight the information it receives, to eliminate odd results from especially fast or slow drivers, and to emphasize the newest data. Each Dash reading will time out after no more than 25 minutes, turning solid lines into dotted ones as a warning that the information may be old.

I did run into a couple of glitches during the test. For one small road Katie had traveled, I received no Dash data. And on the return trip, Dash tried to route me right into a Beltway traffic jam, even though its screen showed that area in red. The company is working a future feature, called My Route, that would allow savvy drivers to order the device to use the local routes they prefer, to avoid such jams.

Dash Express has a host of other nice features, explained online at dash.net. Instead of giving you one route to your destination, it offers three choices, one of which supposedly incorporates current traffic conditions. It allows you to type in a destination on a personalized MyDash Web page and have that address sent wirelessly to your Dash unit, ready to be selected. You could even have a colleague or friend send you a destination while you are driving, so you don’t have to pull over to type it in or, worse, try typing while driving.

And the Dash also connects to the Internet to perform searches for local businesses, and then routes you there. Plus, you can create your own lists of favorite places and points of interest, or share those created by others and send these to your Dash from the MyDash Web site.

Dash Express finally brings the power of the Internet, and of community information, to auto navigation. If it becomes popular, it could be a big deal.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But this isn’t the much-touted Apple MacBook Air, introduced last month with all those qualities. Instead, it’s a new ThinkPad from Lenovo, the X300. While the two machines are both impressive products, they are different in key respects.

I’ve been testing the ThinkPad X300 and I have found it to be a solid, innovative laptop that will be perfect for many mobile PC users. It isn’t as sexy or inexpensive as the MacBook Air, but it has numerous features the Apple lacks, especially a wide array of ports and connectivity options, a built-in DVD drive and a removable battery.

I can recommend the X300 for road warriors without hesitation, provided they can live with its two biggest downsides: a relatively paltry file-storage capacity and a hefty price tag. This ThinkPad starts at $2,476 for a stripped-down model and at $2,799 for a preconfigured retail version with a half-size battery. The configuration I expect to be the most popular, with a full-size battery and DVD drive, is about $3,000.

The key factor in both of these downsides is the solid-state drive, or SSD, which replaces the hard disk. The SSD is fast and rugged, but today it can hold only a cramped 64 gigabytes of files and is very costly. Apple offers a MacBook Air version with the same solid-state drive for a similar high price. But Apple also has a much more affordable $1,799 model with an 80-gigabyte standard hard disk. Lenovo doesn’t.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300

The X300, due to go on sale next week at lenovo.com and at a few retailers, isn’t as thin as the MacBook Air. In fact, at its thinnest point it is almost as thick as the Apple is at its thickest point. And when the new ThinkPad is ordered in what are likely to be its most common configurations, it is heavier than the three-pound Apple and, in fact, fails to make the three-pound cutoff that typically denotes a “subnotebook.” Only one configuration breaks that barrier, at 2.93 pounds, and it is the stripped-down model with just a half-size battery and no DVD drive.

But the X300, which will come with either Windows Vista or Windows XP, is still very thin and light. It’s under an inch thick and even at its heaviest is only 3.5 pounds. Yet, like the Apple, it packs in a widescreen 13.3-inch display and a full-width keyboard.

Plus, Lenovo has used that extra thickness to good advantage. While the MacBook Air’s extreme thinness makes it gorgeous, it left no room for an Ethernet jack, a removable battery, a built-in DVD drive or a cellphone modem. The X300 has all these things, either standard or as options, plus three USB ports, compared with just one for the Apple. The Lenovo even offers GPS location-finding, the ability to connect to new wireless USB devices and future support for a forthcoming wireless network standard called WiMax.

The ThinkPad has another advantage: Even though its screen is the same size as the Apple’s, it is higher resolution, so more material can be seen without scrolling. Some people find that higher-resolution screens make text too small to read easily, but I didn’t experience any such problem on the X300.

In my tests, the X300 performed very well, even though it has a relatively slow processor, slower than the MacBook’s.

But the ThinkPad’s battery life was only fair, and was inferior to the Apple’s. In my tough test, where I turn off all power-saving features, set the screen to maximum brightness, turn on Wi-Fi and run a repeating play list of music, the X300 lasted three hours and five minutes. That was 24 minutes less than the comparable MacBook Air. And this was on the $3,000 configuration with a full-size battery and a DVD drive. The more basic models, with a half-size battery, would last only half as long, according to Lenovo.

MacBook Air

In more normal use, the model I tested would likely last under four hours on a charge, and the base models maybe two, compared with about 4.5 hours for the Mac.

I also tested another version of the ThinkPad, which substitutes a second, half-size battery for the DVD drive. It got five hours and 15 minutes, which means you could likely get 6.5 to seven hours in normal usage. That model costs around $2,850.

There are two more factors worth mentioning. I believe that both the Mac operating system and the software that comes with it are superior to the Windows operating system and built-in software offered on the ThinkPad. And the Mac isn’t susceptible to the vast majority of viruses and spyware, and doesn’t require third-party security software.

Also, the ThinkPad’s screen, when opened, stands significantly higher than the Mac’s, so it is less usable in a coach seat on an airplane when the person in front of you reclines.

If you’re happy with Windows, can afford the price tag, and value the many ports and connectivity options Lenovo has packed in, the thin and rugged X300 is a great choice. It’s a notable engineering accomplishment.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

That may sound like Apple’s heavily publicized iPhone, which runs on the AT&T wireless network, but it’s not. This phone is called the Voyager, and it’s made by LG and runs on the rival Verizon Wireless network.

Despite their superficial similarities, the two devices are very, very different. In fact, Verizon’s public-relations people are at pains to say the Voyager isn’t intended as an “iPhone killer” or even a “smart phone.”

Still, the Voyager is worth a close look, if only because it is one of the first competitors that attempts to mimic Apple’s touch interface, and many of its functions overlap the iPhone’s.

The Voyager beats the iPhone in certain respects. Unlike Apple’s product, it runs on a fast, 3G data network. And my experience has been that Verizon’s network has better coverage than AT&T’s in many cities, especially on the East Coast. It also costs less: $299, after a rebate, with a two-year service contract, compared with $399 for the iPhone.

In addition, the Voyager has GPS and thus provides real-time navigation, a capability the iPhone currently lacks. And the Voyager can even receive live TV programs for an extra monthly fee of $15, though it gets only eight channels and its TV function works only in certain cities.

A big advantage of the Voyager for some people is that it has a physical keyboard for typing in addition to the kind of virtual onscreen keys that are the iPhone’s only method for entering text. This keyboard is revealed by opening the phone, which then resembles a little laptop with a display that’s separate from the outside touch screen. I found that typing worked pretty well. For folks who insist on a physical keyboard, this is a big deal.

Finally, LG has enhanced the Voyager’s touch screen with feedback: When you tap an icon or scroll through a list, you get a light physical sensation.

But the Voyager is bulkier than the sleek iPhone — about 50% thicker and 40% larger overall — even though it’s a tad lighter. And it lacks the iPhone’s ability to use Wi-Fi hot spots and home networks, which are often faster than Verizon’s 3G network. It also has only about half the battery life; a smaller, lower-resolution screen, and just a fraction of the Apple’s internal memory. (Unlike the iPhone, the Voyager lets you add memory cards, but it doesn’t come with any.)

Most importantly, the Voyager suffers badly in the area where Apple’s phone shines: software. Whether Verizon considers it a direct iPhone competitor or not, the LG product tries to do many of the same things, and it generally falls short.

This is the true challenge that the iPhone poses to established phone makers like LG. Apple has managed to build into its phone a real PC-grade operating system with a breakthrough user interface and elegant programs, something that has eluded the major cellphone makers.

As with so many of the new feature-packed mobile phones, the Voyager’s user interface is clumsy and confusing, requiring too many steps to perform simple tasks. And its applications, such as the photo organizer, music player, Web browser and email program, are primitive compared with the iPhone’s.

In fact, the Voyager, bafflingly, has several different user interfaces — two on the outer touch screen and an entirely different one on the inner screen above the keyboard that doesn’t work by touch at all. Some functions work only with the inner screen.

Scrolling through lists with the Voyager’s touch screen is a halting, frustrating process compared with the smooth, slick scrolling on the iPhone. Its touch functions are old style and basic compared with the new “multitouch” approach that Apple built into the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, the Voyager doesn’t allow you to “flick” through photos or other screens, or to use two fingers to enlarge or shrink photos or Web pages. It also doesn’t automatically change photos or Web pages from portrait to landscape view by just turning the phone.

In addition, while the Voyager’s Web browser can show real Web-page layouts, I found it to be far inferior to the iPhone’s browser, which shows entire pages and then zooms in on the parts you want to read with a couple of finger taps.

Apparently because the Voyager isn’t considered a business tool or smart phone, its email function isn’t included on any of the main menus or even located under the envelope icon labeled “messaging.” To find it, you have to wade through multiple menus with unhelpful names like “Tools on the Go.”

Even doing something as simple as entering flight mode — which turns off a phone’s internal radios for use on a plane and takes two steps on the iPhone — requires five steps on the Voyager.

Verizon is promising to improve the Voyager, but right now it’s a classic example of how the leading cellphone makers are going to have to step up their games, especially in software, to match Apple’s upstart device.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.