Android phones have really taken a lot of the steam out of AT&T stranglehold on the super-smart phone market and HTC is the leader in Droid compatible mobile devices but is their new Incredible really as good as the company promises?
There’s no doubt that the HTC Incredible is a sleek little machine. The exterior design and physical layout of all the controls including their integration with the 3.7” AMOLED screen is near to perfect and developers somehow managed to shave an ounce and a half out of the weight compared to Motorola’s Droid. But when you get into the inner workings of the gadget, it’s almost as if the folks who slapped it together forgot it was supposed to be a phone.
Running on the Android 2.1 OS you can’t really fault the operation. It’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor really speeds everything up (with some operations clocking in at nearly 1/3 faster!) You also get an 8-megapixel camera with Dual LED flash (something Apple fans are going to have to wait for the iPhone 4G to get) and 8Gb built in memory—not a lot but better than the previous generation Droid phones.
Is the HTC Incredible all Flash?
There’s no physical keyboard, which I personally don’t mind, but I know some of you purists out there are going to hate the phone for that, and for the sake of aesthetics the Incredible doesn’t have an external shutter button—it’s touch screen only.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for good marks for the Incredible. For a phone, the call quality is abysmal. On both ends of the callers sound snowy and washed out like back in the caveman days of cell phones though lost calls generally aren’t a problem. Another drawback is the short battery life (somewhere around 5 hours give or take the amount and type of usage) which is confusing because the AMOLED screen is supposed to be so much more energy efficient than standard LCD screens. Perhaps the larger processor is sucking more juice.
While the Incredible really isn’t, it’s not a bad device. It’s very web-friendly and features “Friend Stream” showing all of your Facebook, Twitter, and Flikr updates on one section of your customizable home screen.
So if you need a mobile device but don’t actually make many phone calls the Incredible may be perfect for you.
