Review – HTC Incredible
I’ve finally joined the masses of smartphone users and my debut phone of choice is the HTC Incredible. Having used Apple iPhones, HTC Eris devices, several forms of Blackberry, and even a fair share of Windows Mobile and Palm Pilot devices, I have a moderate amount of experience. I don’t claim to be an expert mind you, but being a geek and playing with gadgets has offered me a solid basis for comparison.
Let’s start with the OS. My first device anything like this was a Handspring. It ran an old version (by current standards) of the Palm OS and displayed in a glorious four or so shades of gray. It helped to organize my life, track gas mileage, and of course play games. I loved almost everything about it, except that when the AA batteries died, so did basically everything else in the device. Reconfigure everything because your batteries died. Very bad. I had as “mine on loan” a Handspring Treo given to me by my employer for a while too. Nearly the same OS, nearly the same device, add color, add a little more memory and CPU power. After that I bought a Casio Cassiopeia. Way more horsepower than either of the Handspring devices and ran Windows CE. Overall it was a decent device for the two weeks it worked. The backlight went out on the screen and it was useless after that. In the time I had to play, it seemed cool but it was little more than an elaborate PDA or a Windows computer that was slow to the point of useless, endured a tiny screen and required a stylus to use. This brings me to my HTC Incredible and the Android OS by Google. The Android OS, for those taking notes, is an impressively light weight version of Linux designed primarily for little devices like smartphones. It is far and away my favorite OS for a device so far. To be fair, the ease of getting apps and syncing over the air and everything like that gives it a bit of a user experience edge over previous devices I had that were not network or phone enabled.
As for devices like the Incredible, I’ve played with the iPhones of several friends and I’ve generally liked what I’ve seen, but it never inspired me to buy one. I’ve seen Blackberry devices too, but as far as I can tell those are used exclusively for email. As a developer, I like to evaluate devices partially on the criteria of writing code to run on them. No one seems to use extra apps on a Blackberry at all, so that’s out. Apple’s draconian rules for developers such as “you have to buy a Mac computer to develop for the iPhone” seemed to me to make developing for the platform way too costly. Android doesn’t seem to have those problems. The SDK is free, you can code on any computer you like, and you can even “sideload” applications into the phone for testing without dealing with the marketplace at all until you are ready. That makes me a happy developer and gives me more reasons to like the OS.
I’ve heard complaints over the number of apps available for Android when compared to the iPhone. As I write this, I’ve heard the numbers placed at roughly 50k on Android and 100k on iPhone. I don’t know about you, but that seems like way more than I could ever need on either. Everything I search for I find about twenty of, and I’m left to find the one that seems to be the best rated and the cheapest. Doubling that to forty results to every search honestly wouldn’t change much I figure. The quality of the apps I’ve found seem just fine to me. Generally few bugs, remarkably few crashes, none of the crashes take down the OS itself, and in fact many of them don’t even fully down down the app that crashed. That last tidbit is quite remarkable and I think it has something to do with apps being made up of bunches of “Activities” that run almost independently of each other. Since I got the phone about a week ago I’ve used it almost non-stop and I’ve seen about five crash popups, so we aren’t taking a lot of crashes.
There have been random complaints about the scree style used on the Incredible and Nexus One phones. They use what is called an AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen in a RGBW (Red Green Blue White) layout called a PenTile pattern. Complaints about the AMOLED part are that the colors are almost super saturated or “blown out.” My experience so far is that the colors are spot on beautiful and the impression that may be causing that is the lack of gray colored washout common on basically all backlit LCD screens. Since in an AMOLED screen each pixel puts out light by itself, there is no backlight at all so the grayish-white cast created by the backlight is missing entirely. The other complaint is that the screen’s PenTile pattern is ugly or distracting. There have been loads of pictures taken of this style screen that make them look very bad but look at one in person before you decide. I see no oddities in color or pattern at all, and I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate a screen at an insane magnification. That would be like looking at a nearly perfect diamond under 100x magnification and being disgusted by flaws that no one would ever seen without that level of zoom. It’s frankly silly.
The camera in the phone is quite impressive. Clocking in at 8.0mp it’s capable of capturing more of the scene’s details than even some point and click cameras. The disadvantage of the camera is that it’s got an insanely little sensor and an equally tiny lens paired with an “in software” set of features like auto-focus and zoom. It takes excellent pictures in daylight and the twin LED flash system does remarkably well at night as long as you are reasonably close to your subject. My personal take is that if you want a camera, you should buy a camera. If you want a phone that can take very decent pictures, you should buy the Incredible.
Overall I’m very happy with the phone. I’ve done side-by-side comparisons to the HTC Eris (the Incredible’s predecessor) for things like boot up time, speech recognition time, and a few other identical apps performance levels, and it somewhat obviously blew the Eris away on every front, every time. I highly recommend the HTC Incredible, even to dedicated Apple fans. You won’t be disappointed.