Mobile phone manufacturers have a tenuous and tense balance to maintain when developing new mobile units for their avid user bases. Various factors have to be taken into consideration — from the financial aspect of things, which involves tailoring a new model to fit within a specific production and purchasing budget, to the feature aspect, which focuses on just what basic and advanced capabilities the new phone model is to be given while working to fit within the budget. As it happens, many mobile phone manufacturers are content to merely rehash whatever worked with previous models in their desire to release a model that “gets it right”.
HTC’s Droid Incredible is a subversion of this veritable trope, taking a lot of the old and making it new again while managing to carve out an interesting place in the sun for itself alone just by outright outperforming any other similar handsets. With a number of strengths and weaknesses all its own, the HTC Droid Incredible stands out as a new addition to HTC’s formidable lineup. Just living up to its own name would have been a challenge, but the Incredible manages capably. Along with great speed thanks to the Verizon 3G network and the excellent HTC Sense platform maximizing and enhancing Android 2.1 features, the Droid Incredible has plenty of pluses like an 8-megapixel camera and a variety of connectivity options such as Bluetooth, GPS and 3G.
Clocking in at more or less the same size as the Nexus One, HTC’s Droid Incredible is compact and attractive. Its capacitive touch screen is fairly sizeable and eye-catching at 3.7 inches diagonally, with a 480×800 WVGA resolution similar to [but actually displaying more smoothly and vibrantly than] that of the Nexus One. Its speed and responsiveness are also very good, with the internal accelerometer shifting screen orientation and the proximity sensor picking up an approaching face/ear for a call both fairly quickly. HTC uses its own onscreen keyboard, which has slightly bigger keys than the typical Android’s. There is no Swype, however, as it’s in closed beta for Android.
The Droid Incredible’s user interface is certainly worth discussing as well, considering how well the HTC Sense UI works compared to the standard Android UI [which is itself no slouch]. The revamped HTC Sense gives the Droid Incredible a great user-friendly interface and various new advantages, like a revamped mail widget with a quick-access tabbed interface, an Agenda widget that streamlines your organizational browsing, and features like the Group Contacts widget and Friend Stream , the latter of which is a one-stop shop for your social networking needs via Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Of course, the Droid Incredible also includes standard Android features like live wallpaper, Google Maps Navigation, Gmail [as well as POP3, IMAP and Exchange support], a YouTube-specific app, and QuickOffice, among others.
Multimedia performance is serviceable, and the included player supports most major file formats. The 8-megapixel camera takes fairly good photographs, and while not perfect, call quality is also clear with little background noise. All told, the Droid Incredible has fairly established itself as Verizon’s new Android model to beat.
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