An Incredible Review

It’s only day 2, so I’m clearly in the honeymoon period with my new phone. And for all the iPhone users out there you have to remember that I am moving from a dying Blackberry Pearl, so I had nowhere to go but up. So here are my early thoughts.

Phone Size: Very sleek. The one thing I liked about the Pearl was how tiny it is. The Incredible is actually thinner and only a tiny bit bigger. Very happy with the size. It seems thinner than my wife’s iPhone, but I think that’s just because I haven’t bought a case yet.

Screen: Fantastic. The clarity is stunning. I was happy reading eBooks on my Pearl, you can imagine how ecstatic I am now. No Kindle for me, thank you.

EMail: This, of course, is where Blackberry shines, so I wasn’t expecting an upgrade here. But most of my email is GMail based, so some parts of the experience are better. The best thing that my Blackberry did was have a single inbox that consolidated both Gmail accounts and Hotmail. But there was some weirdness. For my Hotmail account, reading an email on my Blackberry marked it as read on Hotmail. But with Gmail (via IMAP) the read/unread marks did not sync up. That was annoying.

On the Incredible, the annoyances have flipped. GMail is totally in sync and totally the way GMail should be (with conversations). Everything syncs perfectly. My only gripe is that my work and personal accounts are in separate inboxes (same app, different lists). But the seamless way that notifications work on the phone make that a fairly minor issue. My Hotmail account has to be in a separate app entirely. That’s annoying. And since it is POP3, it does not update the read/unread marks.

So this is probably a wash.

Camera: I haven’t used it enough yet. Seems good.

Video: Haven’t tried it yet.

Browser: Very nice. I’ve tried a couple of the other browsers, but the default one works very well. All the pinch and zoom stuff works very nicely. I also like the cut and paste implementation. Very effective when dealing with small print.

HTC Sense UI: Here I can’t really compare it to the regular Android home page since I’ve never used it. I’m comparing more to the look of an iPhone. I like this a lot. HTC created some nice widgets to give the phone a cool look. If you’ve seen pictures of the Incredible you’ve seen the big old school clock at the top with local weather integrated. Very nice. And the customizable pages are very iPhone like.

And, though totally pointless, I’m a fan of the Live Wallpaper. When your screen is largely covered with apps, the wallpaper isn’t that important. But I like the "Grass" Live Wallpaper. Your background is basically the blue sky with a few blades of grass at the bottom. Nothing fancy. But the sky changes color with the time of day (you get tiny stars at night) and if you look carefully you notice that the blades of grass are swaying slightly in the breeze. Again, totally pointless, but I like it. I still need to see what affect it has on the battery.

Sense UI comes with FriendFeed, which consolidates Twitter and Facebook. This I don’t like, because it automatically posts updates to both. I really use them differently so I wouldn’t want to post the same thing in both places. Though it does consolidate them nicely, I’ll be using the separate apps.

Battery: This is still the big unknown. Today is the first day starting with a full charge and I’m still not using it normally. I’m playing constantly. I’m also always around WiFi so it is constantly using WiFi (better performance, more battery drain). I’m downloading apps right and left and I’m constantly tinkering. So I doubt the charge will last the day. HTC has a nice WiFi on/off widget, so if battery life seems to be an issue, I won’t leave WiFi on all the time.

Ah, I just found a place where the phone will tell you what apps are using how much battery. Nice. I had one rogue app eating battery so that one is out of here.

Phone quality: Well, I’m still on Verizon so it’s excellent. I’ve done multiple work conference calls with no issues.

Music: I’ve always used my iPod for music, so having it on my phone isn’t a big deal to me. But it is nice to have. Clearly if you buy a lot of music from iTunes and you want that music on your phone, an iPhone is the best option. But since iTunes has started using iTunes Plus as their standard, all of those songs will copy over fine. I tried out doubleTwist, which functions like iTunes for Andriod. It worked great, synced my iTunes playlists onto my phone.

Apps: This is the big deal, of course. I’m sure the iPhone has more and better apps. But the things I really care about I have:

• eReader – for eBooks. Links with Barnes and Noble
• AIM (there are IM aggregators, but everyone I chat with is on AIM)
• SportsTap – very nice app with all sports scores.
• Seesmic – Twitter client
• Facebook
• Google Sky Map – Can’t wait to use this in Cape Cod.
• Shazam
• WordPress – can update this blog
• Yelp
• Documents to Go
• NewsRob – RSS feed that links to your Google Reader settings
• Pandora
• PdaNet – Phone can act as modem for my PC
• and a bunch of games

I haven’t paid for any apps yet. ZipCar has an iPhone app that would be nice to have, but it isn’t available for Android yet. There’s a cool iPhone NYC subway app and I think it’s available for Android but not free. I’m sure there are others, but right now I’m good.

So far it’s a great phone. Now, if the iPhone was available on Verizon, would I get the Incredible? Excellent question. The Incredible is probably second best, but I’m pretty disappointed in Apple’s closed approach. So I’d be pretty conflicted…