{"id":118,"date":"2010-05-24T18:14:41","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T22:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jasonmcreynolds.com\/?p=118"},"modified":"2015-10-16T11:54:12","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T19:54:12","slug":"htc-%e2%80%9cdroid%e2%80%9d-incredible-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonmcreynolds.com\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"HTC \u201cDroid\u201d Incredible Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

My First Impressions<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got my first Android phone and, long story short: I\u2019m loving it.<\/p>\n

Why make the switch to Android now? Read on…<\/p>\n

I’ve\u00a0owned WinMo phones forever because I wasn\u2019t willing to switch to another carrier and Verizon hasn\u2019t had a compelling phone to offer until now. Yes, the Moto Droid was a contender but I think it\u2019s ugly and after demoing it in the store a couple times I just didn\u2019t like it. I was waiting for the Nexus One, but the Incredible came out first, has a better camera and a better screen (no multi-touch issues like the N1). So, April 29th arrived and I called the Verizon store where I live and asked that they reserve one for me. I didn\u2019t care that I still had about 6 months until my \u201cNew every two\u201d. Shelling out a little extra to get rid of my Samsung Omnia i910 was well worth it. That phone was driving me nuts!<\/p>\n

OK, so on to the Incredible. I really liked the responsiveness of the touch screen. Swiping through the home screens and using the \u201cLeap\u201d view made me a little giddy. Getting email setup was easy. Customizing the home screens was also easy and there are plenty of widgets to keep anyone busy. It\u2019s nice that there are several customized Scenes that you can choose from. And, once you get a layout setup that you like you can save it. With so much to customize, I still haven’t figured out what I like best.<\/p>\n

Below is my two cents on the HTC Incredible based on a few weeks of use. I won\u2019t go over FriendStream or how the HTC Sense UI tries to integrate all of your contact info, because that\u2019s discussed all over the Internet. I actually like it, others don\u2019t. Although, there\u2019s no way to turn it off on the HTC Droid Incredible.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Battery Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the first couple weeks I was using it a lot and have to admit that I was not impressed with the battery life at all. I think my next upgrade will be a higher capacity, slim battery. That should allow me to make it through the day without any problems. For those that don\u2019t use the phone much for \u201cother stuff\u201d (but really, who wouldn\u2019t\u2026???), the battery will probably be more than sufficient.<\/p>\n

The Display<\/strong><\/p>\n

Think of the Incredible as a vampire, sunlight pretty much kills the display (well, being able to view it). However, I think people might be over emphasizing this issue when they say that it\u2019s not really useable in bright sunlight. The old phone I had didn\u2019t do well in bright sunlight either. I think it\u2019s a common problem on a lot of devices so singling out one type of display seems a little misleading. I could be wrong here, but I really don\u2019t have that may devices to test with to prove otherwise.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad that the Incredible doesn\u2019t suffer from the same problems that the Nexus One has with the multi-touch responsiveness and the navigation buttons at the bottom. However, it has been pointed out that there seems to be a problem with responsiveness when the device isn\u2019t properly grounded. You can see info about this here<\/a>. I had never had any issues (I don\u2019t use a car dock though) so I ran the same tests and had similar results, but not as drastic.<\/p>\n

Email<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Gmail app is pretty nice and I like that it gives you a similar experience to what you have using a browser on a PC, albeit somewhat limited. You can Star emails and bulk process: Archive, Apply Labels and Delete. The search feature not only checks what\u2019s on your phone locally, but searches your email on Gmail\u2019s servers. Unfortunately, with the Gmail app, you can\u2019t copy text from an email nor can you edit original text if you forward an email. It makes me wonder if the employees at Google ever used this app. They must have been using Exchange since these problems would have been pretty evident had they used it. However, the copy\/edit text issue looks like it might be addressed in Android 2.2, Froyo. In the meantime, you can work around this by setting up your Gmail account as a regular IMAP account, minus the labels, search, conversations, etc..<\/p>\n

I was stoked to hear that you could run multiple Exchange accounts with Android but for whatever reasons you can only setup one Exchange account with the HTC Droid Incredible. Maybe this has something to do with the \u201cenhanced\u201d Exchange experience that Sense UI provides, but I really hate it when things get removed that should be there by default.<\/p>\n

I did find that searching the company address book didn\u2019t work if I typed in a name and then pressed the Enter key on the virtual keyboard. It drove me nuts for a few days but then I finally just pressed the little magnifying glass up in the search bar and VIOLA! It worked. Not sure how this was missed. It would have been nicer if results would display when you typed the characters rather than having to press a button to get the results.<\/p>\n

Internet<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really like how fast the browser is on this phone. I even prefer it over the iPod Touch that I have (the newest version).<\/p>\n

The pinch-to-zoom works great and even though Flash isn\u2019t as complete as it will be with Froyo, I am able to view sites that I wasn\u2019t able to on my iPod Touch (or any iPhone or iPad J). On the WinMo phones that I\u2019ve owned, browsing the Internet was excruciating and very slow. It\u2019s a marked difference on the Incredible and it\u2019s actually enjoyable.<\/p>\n

The Keyboard<\/strong><\/p>\n

I actually prefer the keyboard and the auto-suggestion\/correction on the Incredible over the keyboard and auto-suggestion\/correction on my iPod Touch. It seems to work better at correcting mistakes. The landscape mode is even better to type in but my complaint about the landscape view is that you only get the keyboard ant the text entry block, nothing else. So, you can\u2019t see anything else when you are in landscape mode. It\u2019s kind of a pain if you\u2019re filing out web forms or typing in URLs.<\/p>\n

The Optical Track Pad<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought I would like the optical track pad on the Incredible, but I don\u2019t. I think I would rather have a ball (I\u2019ve never had one so I can\u2019t say for sure). I don\u2019t like it because I\u2019ve tried to use it in some games and it\u2019s pretty much useless. It\u2019s no replacement for a D-pad. However, it works fine if you need to navigate through menus, or if you need to navigate a web page. Its best use is for editing text. Other than that there\u2019s really not much of a use for it.<\/p>\n

Onboard Storage<\/strong><\/p>\n

The onboard storage is nice, other than you can\u2019t install apps there\u2026yet. I had to look a little to figure out which directory it was, but finally found everything under the \u00a0\u201c\/emmc\u201d directory.<\/p>\n

Music and Movies<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s no real easy way to get movies to the device. Also, it wasn\u2019t really easy to figure out how to find and play a movie once I had some on the phone. I ended up installing mVideoPlayer and it works for what it\u2019s supposed to do.<\/p>\n

I did find a cool little app that you can run on your PC that allows you to setup your phone as a device in iTunes so you can sync music and playlists using iTunes. It\u2019s called \u201ciTunes Agent<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

As for the actual music player, I know HTC has made some changes to it and others seem to agree that it\u2019s an improvement. I don\u2019t have any complaints about it, it works just fine for me. In the main view there\u2019s a \u201ccover flowish\u201d view of the songs that are playing, but it didn\u2019t rotate to landscape mode. The HTC Music widgets are easy to use, with the larger one allowing you to shuffle or repeat directly from it. For the most part, it\u2019s pretty intuitive and was easy to navigate through songs, artists, etc. Creating and modifying a playlist on the phone was pretty easy too.<\/p>\n

Camera and Video<\/strong><\/p>\n

I haven’t used the camera a lot but the pictures that I have taken have turned out nice. The auto-focus seems to work pretty well and it’s rather quick when you do take a picture. Once you have taken pictures, it’s really easy to share them with anyone or post them on Facebook, Flickr or Picasa.<\/p>\n

I haven’t really used the video much, but from what I’ve read it seems to do a decent job.<\/p>\n

Must Have Apps<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a list of apps that I have found to be useful in customizing, managing and just adding fun features to the HTC Droid Incredible:<\/p>\n