No, this isn?t one of the HTC ?One? Phones. Rather than keep the One design and slap a new name on it, like Sprint mostly did with the HTC EVO 4G LTE ($199.99, 4 stars), Verizon and HTC are going for something different here. The $149.99 HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE is more of an honest-to-goodness follow-up to the HTC Droid Incredible 2 (3.5 stars) than it is an extension of HTC?s top-tier new One brand. That?s both good and bad.
The Droid Incredible 4G LTE retains the same general shape and size of its predecessors, which is great news for anyone that isn?t keen on the super large, hand-busting new smartphone trend. On the other hand, the Incredible eschews some of the best features from the One line, like a faster 1.5GHz processor and HTC?s ImageSense camera processor. The Droid Incredible is still a very good smartphone?it?s just a notch below the One.
Design and Call Quality
The Incredible 4G LTE measures 4.8 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.8 ounces. It might sound silly, but size is probably the primary reason to get this phone. While other top smartphones tend to rely on the idea that bigger is better, the truth is, phones with a 4-inch display are just more comfortable to hold if you have average size hands. The Incredible is a little thick, but it has a solid feel, with a textured, rubberized black panel. The glass front of the phone is surrounded by a thin, shiny black plastic band, and there are red accents around the camera sensor, on the Power button, and on the speaker grill for the earpiece. All told, it looks a lot like the original Droid Incredible (4.5 stars).
The 4-inch qHD Super LCD features 960-by-540-pixel resolution. That?s not quite on par with the brilliant 720p display on the HTC Rezound ($199.99, 4 stars), but it still looks sharp and bright. And despite the phone?s smaller-than-average stature, typing feels fine on the onscreen keyboard.
The Incredible is a dual-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900 MHz) and single-band LTE (700MHz) device with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. Data speeds are excellent on Verizon?s 4G LTE network, which recently led the pack in our testing for the Fastest Mobile Networks. Download speeds averaged close to 10Mbps on the Incredible, while upload speeds were around 8.5Mbps. You can use it as a mobile hotspot to share that data with up to 10 connected devices with the appropriate plan. And if you?re looking to conserve data, the Incredible connected to my WPA2-encrypted Wi-Fi network without a problem.
Voice quality is a strong point. Voices sound loud and clear in the phone?s earpiece, if a bit digitized. Calls made with the phone are equally easy to hear, with a natural quality and good noise cancellation. Calls were fine through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars) and voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth. The speakerphone sounds okay, and volume goes loud enough to use it outdoors. The 1700mAh battery was good for a solid 8 hours and 43 minutes of talk time.
Hardware, OS, and HTC Sense 4
The Incredible uses the same dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chip as the HTC One X ($199.99, 4.5 stars), except here it?s clocked at 1.2GHz instead of 1.5GHz. That still makes for fast mobile performance?just not quite as fast as the One phones or the Samsung Galaxy S III ($199.99-$249.99). Still, you?ll be able to run all of the apps and games available in the Google Play store without a problem.
Android 4.0.3 is on board here, along with HTC Sense 4.0. Sense 4.0 is a much lighter implementation of HTC?s UI overlay than we?ve seen before, and very enjoyable to use. You get seven customizable home screens to swipe between. They come preloaded with some helpful apps and widgets, along with a hefty 15 items of bloatware from Verizon. None of the bloatware is deletable, but it didn?t seem to impact performance.
Emails are threaded, making them easier to read, and task switching is handled by flicking through a set of tiles of all your open apps. HTC Car is a gorgeous driving mode that displays large icons across a landscape screen while you?re driving. There are also a number of call and control gestures. Flip over your ringing phone to silence it, for instance. Or if you?re already on a call, just flip the device to activate the speakerphone.
HTC Watch lets you rent and buy movies directly on the handset, and you have a number of options for viewing content on the big screen, including DLNA and support for HTC?s wireless Media Link. You can also use an MHL adapter to plug into your HDTV with an HDMI cable and watch content from your phone.
Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
There?s 5.21GB of free internal storage. That may not sound like much, but unlike any of the HTC One phones, the Incredible 4G LTE also comes with an empty microSD card slot underneath the battery cover, which lets you increase your storage significantly. My 32 and 64GB SanDisk microSD cards worked fine.
The phone doesn?t come with headphones, but you can use Beats regardless of the pair you plug in. It basically gives you a bit of a bass boost, and depending on the type of heaphones you use and the type of music you?re listening to, it can sound pretty good. Just make sure to test it out to see which option sounds better to you.
The Incredible was able to play all of our music test files except for FLAC, and sound quality was great over both wired earbuds as well as Altec Lansing BackBeat Bluetooth headphones ($99, 3.5 stars). The phone played H.264 and MPEG4 video files at resolutions up to 1080p, which looked great, though it wouldn?t play any AVI clips. Audio, while fine over headphones, had a very slight delay over Bluetooth.
The 8-megapixel, auto-focus, f/2.2 camera includes a dual-LED flash and a 28mm wide-angle lens. It?s a good camera, but as far as we can tell, it lacks the dedicated ImageSense processor found in the HTC One phones. Still, it?s very fast. There?s essentially zero shutter lag, as the camera takes photos almost instantaneously. In good lighting, colors look rich, but almost too saturated. White balance seems a bit inaccurate, as bright outdoor lighting tends to look somewhat blue. There are lots of fun built-in filters, like country, sepia, and vintage. You can also take still photos while shooting video.
The camera also captures 1080p video at 20 frames per second indoors and 30 frames per second outside. Video looks decent, but again, bright light tends to skew blue. There?s also a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats.
All told, HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE is a very good phone?it just isn?t as great as an HTC One. But Verizon doesn?t have one of those. So what should you get instead? If you want the top smartphone available, hold out a few days for the Samsung Galaxy S III. We haven?t tested it on Verizon yet, but if the versions we?ve seen on AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile are any indication, it?ll be the new phone to beat. It has a larger, 4.8-inch 720p display, along with a faster 1.5GHz processor and a better camera.
The Motorola Droid Razr Maxx ($299.99, 4.5 stars) and Samsung Galaxy Nexus ($149.99, 4 stars) are still good choices as well, but like the GSIII, those are very large phones. If you?re looking for something in a more manageable size, you may want to consider the Apple iPhone 4S ($199.99-$399.99, 4 stars), which is very comfortable to hold, has the best app catalog of any mobile OS, as well as a gorgeous, ultra-sharp retina display. But if you prefer to stick to Android, the Droid Incredible 4G LTE costs a bit less and is very comfortable to handle, with plenty of power to boot.
Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 8 hours 43 minutes
Source : P C Mag
