The market’s smartphone segment has been crowded with Samsung’s release of its new Instinct device, labeled immediately as a pure iPhone copy. The carefully planned strategy to bring it to the market a few weeks before the release of the new iPhone turned out to be a huge success.

Sprint, U.S.’s third largest wireless carrier, the only retailer for Samsung’s gadget, announced that its release managed to hit record sales in its opening week. The huge popularity caused a series of temporary shortages at some of the company’s stores and apparently, the carrier and Samsung are making significant efforts to provide new shipments in order to avoid such situations.

There haven’t been any official sales figures released yet and at this point the question is whether the hype will continue once the new iPhones hit the shelves.

Samsung based its strategy on offering a very similar product to Apple’s, at a lower price. The Samsung Instinct retails for $129.99 with a two-year subscription deal, being $70 cheaper than the 3G iPhone.

The smartphone, also called Samsung SPH M-800, offers many of the iPhone’s features and design details, offering a large touch screen with tactile feedback among others. It also supports corporate and consumer email, Web browsing, it presents multitasking capabilities, has a 2 megapixel camera equipped with camcorder and an expandable memory up to 8 Giga Bytes.

The Instinct features GPS-enabled video and audio driving directions. Its system is powered by TeleNav, including more than 10 million local listings.

Samsung’s true test will begin on July 11, with the official release of Apple’s new iPhone. Only then we will be able to see the people’s preferences and also which advertising campaign turned out to be the smartest.