Well, that may be a bit dra­matic. Maybe it’s sim­ply life com­ing full cir­cle. Either way, after [force­fully] intro­duc­ing my mal­func­tion­ing Droid X into my quartz coun­ter­top, I had to move on to replace­ment phone until I make up my mind about what will be my next major smart­phone pur­chase (iPhone 5? Galaxy Nexus? Galaxy SIII?)

I first thought that I would stop using a smart­phone alto­gether, and use my old, but very slim, LG flip phone that I had in a drawer in my house. That non-data expe­ri­ence only lasted a cou­ple of days. After that, I acti­vated my wife’s old Black­Berry 8830. I could only stand using that Black­Berry for an evening. I jumped on Craigslist and found some­one sell­ing a very clean Droid Incred­i­ble for $90. After a lit­tle email back-and-forth with the seller, I picked it up last night. The Droid Incred­i­ble is nice, slim phone. Inter­est­ingly, though, after using the Droid X for nearly 18 months, the Incred­i­ble seems small. Con­sid­er­ing that I don’t like stuff in my pock­ets, this is not a bad thing.

The Incred­i­ble was my first smart­phone (for per­sonal use). For nostalgia’s sake, here is the write up I posted on my blog when I first got the Incred­i­ble in May of 2010. It’s crazy to think that was almost two years ago. Time in the tech­nol­ogy world should be mea­sured like dog years.

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first impres­sions of the droid incred­i­ble  

A Lit­tle Background

As some of you know, I took the plunge and picked up the HTC ADR6300…better known as the Ver­i­zon Droid Incred­i­ble. Until a few weeks ago, I was patiently wait­ing for the Google Nexus One to show up on Verizon’s net­work. Some­thing told me that there was a chance that this phone may never see the light of day on Ver­i­zon, and this was proven true this past Fri­day (Google Announce­ment).

I have been toy­ing with the idea of upgrad­ing from my LG flip phone to a smart­phone. Just as with any self-respecting tech nerd/geek, I have been read­ing all the tech­nol­ogy and mobile tech blogs to get the most cur­rent infor­ma­tion about devices on the mar­ket, or ones expected to release soon. I have a num­ber of friends and col­leagues that own the iPhone, and have been bend­ing my ear for years about pick­ing one up for myself. I enter­tained the idea, but mov­ing to AT&T wasn’t appeal­ing, and I, in all can­dor, was not that enam­ored with the iPhone. Before any­one makes claims of me being an Apple hater, let me clar­ify that I am very fond of Apple prod­ucts and design. In the case of the iPhone, I just wanted some­thing better.

What that “bet­ter” was, I didn’t know. In the last year, there has been increas­ing talk about the devel­op­ment of devices run­ning with Google’s oper­at­ing sys­tem called Android. Last fall, the Android device that made the most noise is the Motorola Droid. Though the Droid enticed me, I was inter­ested in a phone being devel­oped by Google called the Nexus One. The Nexus One was released on T-Mobile at the begin­ning of the year. At the time of it’s release, Google shared that it Ver­i­zon would carry the Nexus One by the spring. Sub­se­quent to the announce­ment, word started to spread about a new Android OS device for Ver­i­zon. The specs for this Ver­i­zon Android device were, sur­pris­ingly, bet­ter than the Nexus One. So, my delib­er­a­tion on what road to travel really boiled down to 1) won­der­ing whether I would wait to see if the rumors about a CDMA ver­sion of the new iPhone 4G com­ing to Ver­i­zon were true; 2) con­tem­plat­ing jump­ing net­works to get the HTC EVO-4G debut­ing on Sprint in early June; 3) hold out for the Nexus One; or 4) stay on Ver­i­zon and get the Incred­i­ble. A fifth option that I’ve taken off the table for now is the Win­dows Phone 7, expected to debut this fall.

As much as the EVO-4G was (and some­what still is) call­ing my name, I decided that I would go with the Nexus One or the Incredible—really whichever one came out first. On April 12, Ver­i­zon announced the Droid Incred­i­ble would be avail­able on April 29. Pre-orders started on April 19. I was reluc­tant to pre-order the Incred­i­ble because some of the sneak-peek reviews com­mented that the body felt “pla­s­ticky.” This was a lit­tle unset­tling, since the Nexus One has a good deal of metal in its body. After a good deal of last minute hand-wringing, I took my lunch break from a train­ing class for work to run to the Ver­i­zon store on April 29 to pick up the Incred­i­ble. The first store I went to was sold out. My first thought was “Damn!” I was told that another store a short Metro ride away had them in stock. I thought, “Hmmm. Maybe this is a sign that I need to think a lit­tle longer about this.” How­ever, by the time I hit the door of the store I decided to dash to the other Ver­i­zon store. Score! I returned to the last day of my train­ing class (a tad late) with the Incred­i­ble sit­ting on the table charg­ing. It was done. I joined the Android fam­ily. Ok, now onto the phone.

Basic Tour of the Incredible

Once you get beyond the stan­dard HTC and Ver­i­zon splash screens upon startup, you reach the lock screen. (Note: The Incred­i­ble runs on Android OS 2.1, dressed up with HTC’s user inter­face – Sense. Here’s a peek at the “stock” Android lock screen.)

The Incred­i­ble comes with seven adjustable screens, as opposed to the three screens that come with the Motorola Droid or Nexus One. You can quickly add or delete wid­gets and programs/apps to any page. You can swipe left or right to reach the dif­fer­ent screens (a lit­tle bar — just above the phone tab in this pic­ture — moves to let you know where you are in the order of screens) or you can use HTC’s fea­ture called “Leap” that allow you to reduce the screen to a thumb­nail view so you can see all seven screens at once. To reach this view, you can either pinch the screen or press the home button.

From this Leap view, you can touch any of the thumb­nails to imme­di­ately go to a par­tic­u­lar screen. I like the Leap fea­ture, because at times I get tired of the swip­ing ges­ture and want to get a screen quickly. The other way to get to pro­grams or apps quickly is to press the up arrow — to the left of the phone tab in the pic­ture below.

Press­ing the arrow pulls up your program/apps launcher. This screen scrolls up and down. You can look at the pro­grams and apps in a grid or list view. I pre­fer the grid view because your list can get pretty long if you start adding a bunch of apps. You may have noticed an “M” in the stop left cor­ner of the screen in the pic­tures above. This is the noti­fi­ca­tions area of the screen. This is the area of the phone that will give you infor­ma­tion about new e-mail, text mes­sages, and updates com­ing in to your apps. (Mul­ti­task­ing) For instance, the “M” in the noti­fi­ca­tions bar on my phone indi­cates a new e-mail. To learn more about the noti­fi­ca­tions, I sim­ply swipe down from the top of the screen to reveal the noti­fi­ca­tions window.

From the noti­fi­ca­tions win­dow, you can touch the par­tic­u­lar noti­fi­ca­tion, and it will take you to the pro­gram. If you want to ignore the noti­fi­ca­tions, you just swipe up from the bot­tom of the screen to close the noti­fi­ca­tion window.

Impres­sions

I am pretty com­fort­able with dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems, so the tran­si­tion from a basic cell­phone to the Incred­i­ble and Android OS was pretty easy. Though I use a Black­berry for work, the oper­at­ing sys­tem is noth­ing like what you’re used to. I think any­one that’s accus­tomed to an iPhone or iPod Touch will move around the phone pretty intu­itively. There are cer­tain things that act dif­fer­ently from the iPhone, such as the screens swipe left and right more than up and down. Minor dif­fer­ences, though, in the scheme of things. Basic set up is reallyeasy, espe­cially if you use Gmail. Once you type in your Gmail user­name and pass­word, the phone will pop­u­late with your e-mail, cal­en­dar and con­tacts from Google. If you use Yahoo, Hot­mail or any other ser­vice for e-mail, includ­ing Microsoft Exchange, you can add the accounts eas­ily in the HTC mail client. Here are a cou­ple of things worth not­ing about the way things work with HTC Sense.

• If you use Gmail. Be aware that the Gmail app baked into the oper­at­ing sys­tem doesn’t, at this point, have cut-and-paste. If cut-and-paste capa­bil­ity in e-mail is impor­tant to you, use the HTC mail client.  The cut-and-paste in the HTC mail client is easy to use. The only draw­back, that I can see, to using the HTC mail client is that it doesn’t appear to show HTML e-mail—at least con­sis­tently. The Gmail app shows HTML mes­sages, usu­ally ask­ing you if you want to show images before draw­ing all that addi­tional data.
• HTC Sense has a great “peo­ple” (think con­tacts) fea­ture. Instead of hav­ing to search around for an e-mail, text mes­sage, or phone call from a par­tic­u­lar per­son, you can just go to that person’s con­tact page in your Peo­ple app. At the bot­tom of each con­tact page are a series of icons that let you see all the e-mails, text mes­sages, pho­tos, social media updates and phone calls from that per­son. How­ever, in order to take full advan­tage of this fea­ture, you need to use the HTC mail client and run your text mes­sages through the HTC mes­sages pro­gram. I use the Google voice and Gmail apps, so my e-mail and text mes­sages don’t asso­ciate with con­tacts in HTC’s Peo­ple feature.

There are a ton of videos and arti­cles that can give you more infor­ma­tion on the Sense and gen­eral Android fea­tures, so I won’t drone on about them here. Android Cen­tral has a great round up of arti­cles and infor­ma­tion (includ­ing videos, and tips and tricks) about the Incred­i­ble on its site and forum.

Let me touch on the fit and fin­ish of the devices body, which ini­tially gave me pause. Though the front part of the phone is made of a shiny black plas­tic, it doesn’t feel or look cheap. I analo­gized it to my Zune. It’s plas­tic, but if feels sub­stan­tial. The back of the phone is contoured.

The mate­r­ial used on the back of the Incred­i­ble feels some­what rub­ber­ized. Though a bit unusual, the con­toured back doesn’t affect the feel of the phone, and, in my opin­ion, adds a lit­tle bit of a unique design flare to the Incredible.

The Incred­i­ble is very light. Not cheap-feeling light, but light. I prob­a­bly would have pre­ferred some­thing a lit­tle more sub­stan­tial in my hand, but the light weight is great when you have this phone in your pocket. Addi­tion­ally, the Incred­i­ble doesn’t feel flimsy in your hand. I was just sur­prised that a device with all these capa­bil­i­ties would only weight a touch more than my flip phone.

I will write another install­ment to go over some of the apps—both native and those down­loaded from the Android Mar­ket, but I want to talk about just a few other things really quick.

Key­board

If you’re mov­ing from a basic mobile phone or a smart­phone, such as the Black­berry, with a phys­i­cal key­board, to a touch screen-only device, it can be an adjust­ment. Most iPhone users I know say, “You get used to it.” That may be true, there is some­thing to be said about a phys­i­cal key­board. Even after a few weeks with the Incred­i­ble, I find that I type much faster on my Black­berry. The Incred­i­ble does give you feed­back when you touch let­ters on the screen, which helps.If you like the Android OS, but want a phys­i­cal key­board, you need to look at the Droid, CLIQ, Ally, or the new MyTouch3G slider that’s com­ing out soon.

Like most peo­ple, I find that the key­board is much eas­ier to use in land­scape mode (hold­ing the Incred­i­ble side­ways) than in por­trait mode. Per­haps because I have larger fin­gers, but the most accu­rate way to type in por­trait mode is one fin­ger tap­ping. Using two thumbs in por­trait mode, for me, caused me to hit the wrong keys too often. In either ori­en­ta­tion, I appre­ci­ate — well most of the time — the auto=correct or sug­ges­tion fea­ture. As you type the Incred­i­ble intu­itively tries to fig­ure out what you’re typ­ing. It’s par­tic­u­larly help­ful on long words because as you type, words appear above and you sim­ply tap the word to replace what you started. The prob­lem comes when you have words that you know are right and the auto-correct replaces the word for you. The sim­ple, but some­what annoy­ing way to deal with that is to tap the word you typed on the sug­gested word list. When you do this, the word you typed is added to the phone’s dic­tio­nary for future use. It’s a nice fea­ture, but I’ve found that hav­ing to add words here and there through an e-mail slows down my typ­ing. The up-side, I don’t know if it’s unin­tended, of the auto-correct is that it forces me to proof what I’ve writ­ten. (Though I usu­ally do that anyway.)

Oh, if you make errors while you’re typ­ing, you can tap the screen to move the cur­sor back to the area you need to cor­rect. There’s also an opti­cal track pad at the bot­tom of the Incred­i­ble that allows you to move through ele­ments on the screen. I’ve found the opti­cal track pad to be quite respon­sive. You just have to get accus­tomed to the amount of fin­ger move­ment required to get around the screen accurately.

Bat­tery Life

One of the biggest knocks I’ve seen on the phone is it’s rel­a­tively weak bat­tery life. I’m sure the mul­ti­ple programs/apps run­ning have a lot to do with bat­tery per­for­mance. There are pro­grams you can down­load to con­trol or “kill” back­ground apps to save bat­tery life. You can also adjust the default sync­ing option for the phone to con­trol what pro­grams and apps draw data automatically.

I was a bit con­cerned about bat­tery life in the first week with the phone. I was, admit­tedly, play­ing with the phone a lot, so I couldn’t really judge whether the bat­tery was weak or if I was abnor­mally tax­ing the phone. In the past week, I’ve noticed much bet­ter bat­tery life, but “bet­ter” still means I only get less than full day’s use with a charge. Unlike stan­dard cell phones and Black­ber­ries, you will need to charge the Incred­i­ble daily unless you have almost no apps run­ning on the phone.

There are other bat­ter­ies avail­able that fit into the phone, and extended bat­ter­ies are on the way. I may con­sider the higher capac­ity bat­tery that fits into the phone, but I don’t like extended bat­ter­ies because they alter the dimen­sions of the phone—pushing out the back with a dif­fer­ent cover.

Cam­era

I am a pho­tog­ra­pher, so my scrutiny of the qual­ity of images is prob­a­bly more exact­ing than oth­ers. While I don’t expect the Incred­i­ble to replace my DSLRs, I have been curi­ous to see if the 8 megapixel cam­era could stand in place of my point-and-shoot for daily snap­shots and video. Right up front, I will say that I am dis­ap­pointed that the video cam­era does not record in 720p high def­i­n­i­tion for­mat. This is par­tic­u­larly curi­ous, given that the Sprint EVO-4G has the same cam­era and records in 720p. If you spend any­time look­ing at video on YouTube, Vimeo, or other sites, you will appre­ci­ate the qual­ity of HD video. Set­ting that annoy­ance aside, I found that the cam­era takes pretty decent images. The cam­era has selec­tive focus, mean­ing you can touch dif­fer­ent areas of the screen to shift the focus, but so far I’ve found that the focus sys­tem is not as accu­rate as I’d like. Here are some exam­ples I grabbed for this piece.

Images

Notice that Carla’s pic­ture is not quite in focus. I touched the focus area on her face sev­eral times before snap­ping the pic­ture. I even reduced the res­o­lu­tion of the images from 8MP to 1MP in the hopes that it would write faster, and, thus, reduce any affects of cam­era shake.

Video

Again, notice in the sec­ond video that the rose is not in focus, though it’s clos­est to the cam­era. I selected the focus area on the rose, and made sure I was a suf­fi­cient dis­tance from the rose so it was not too close to focus. I sus­pect that spend­ing more time with the cam­era will result in bet­ter image and video quality.

Screen

The Incred­i­ble has a great screen with vibrant col­ors and deep, rich blacks. The response to touch, which is crit­i­cal on a device with no key­board, is fast and pre­cise. I like the hap­tic feed­back (it vibrates a lit­tle) when you make par­tic­u­lar touch inputs. Speak­ing of touch…if you any­where near the OCD issues I have, the fin­ger­prints and smudges on the screen will just about drive you batty–even with a screen pro­tec­tor. I keep a soft lens cloth with me at all times. I guess this just comes with the ter­ri­tory with touch screen devices. It is worth not­ing that one of the draw­backs of AMOLED (Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screens is that they suf­fer from sig­nif­i­cant washout in direct sunlight.

I don’t know how many of you are walk­ing around using your phone in direct sun­light. How­ever, if you spend a lot of time in the sun, you might want to think twice about this phone and look at the Droid, instead. In the cou­ple of weeks that I’ve had the phone, screen glare has not been a problem.

Ver­dict

I love the Incred­i­ble. If you’re look­ing to upgrade from a stan­dard phone or an exist­ing smart­phone, I don’t think you can go wrong. As with any smart­phone on the mar­ket, there are pros and cons that you should weigh, but the Incred­i­ble has far more pros and cons. If you’re on Ver­i­zon, or open to chang­ing net­works, I would strongly rec­om­mend this device. In all can­dor, more than a cou­ple of times, I’ve won­dered whether I should return the phone and move to Sprint to get the EVO-4G, because (among other things) it’s larger, has HD video record­ing, and can act as a mobile hotspot for up to eight devices. The thing that would likely keep me at home on Ver­i­zon with my Incred­i­ble is that I don’t like bulk and can’t imag­ine hav­ing the EVO in my pocket. Stay tuned for another piece, or two, on some of the pro­grams and apps, as well as some tips for using the Incred­i­ble. Please let me know if you have spe­cific ques­tions. I’d be happy to add them to my next piece, or cre­ate a Q&A sheet.