More Incredible

OK, I’ve had the HTC Incredible for over a week now, so I can talk about it a bit more.

Camera: I hadn’t really used it after two days. Now I’ve used it a bit more, though still not a lot. Overall, at 8 megapixels I’d say that this phone can easily be your general day to day camera. I’ve never considered a camera a big part of the phone, but perhaps that’s because I’ve never had a good camera in my phone. Some shots of the girls on a chilly Mother’s Day:

Video: Quite good, though you need the proper lighting. The interesting thing about trying video on your phone is that you naturally just pivot the phone landscape or portrait depending on what looks better. But it’s not as easy to rotate a video.

Here are two videos taken from my phone. The one of Tori dancing to The Wiggles in her PJs was taken portrait, downloaded to my PC and rotated via some freeware. The one of Danielle flipping was uploaded directly to YouTube from my phone, and is thus sideways. But the light was better.

Google Map Navigation: This was called the "killer app" of the Nexus One when it first came out. It may kill Garmin. Especially for someone like me who uses ZipCar  and therefore doesn’t want to install a real GPS system, this is ideal. The turn by turn directions were as good as the GPS on my old Acura. It’s a battery killer, so you definitely need a car charger, but this app is truly great.

Games: Still way too early to tell, but my phone can keep either daughter entertained and I have yet to pay for a game. That was my basic success criteria, so all good there.

Battery Life: If I really use this phone a lot, I can blow through the battery in less than a day. On a regular day’s usage the battery seems to last fine. They are already selling more powerful replacement batteries for the Incredible. I’ll wait on that. I do make sure to turn WiFi and GPS off when I’m not using them. But I’m still leaving the Live Wallpaper on. Silly as it is, I like getting a sunset every day on my phone. If it’s raining, when I turn on my phone a windshield wiper pops up and "clears" the rain off my screen. Yes, I know, totally silly.

Apps: Right now there isn’t anything I can think of  that I need. Yes, I’d like ZipCar to release an Android app. FreshDirect has an iPhone app though I always order food from my laptop so I’m not sure I’d use a phone app. But I’m seeing a rapid move towards Android development (Twitter released their Android app before an iPhone app). So I’m not worried that I won’t have apps that I need.

There are some usability things that I would quibble with. I’m using a different SMS client which I like, but now I’m getting notifications from both the new client and the default SMS client when I get a new text. Haven’t figured out how to turn that off. The behavior when I connect to my computer seems inconsistent. Sometimes I just get my SD card as a hard drive, sometimes I get the phone memory as one drive and the SD card as another.

The biggest negative I have found is that it’s pretty much impossible to download any paid video to this phone. If I buy video on iTunes it is copyright protected and I can’t watch it on my phone. If I use Amazon I get a Windows Media Player file, which my phone doesn’t play (need to look for an app for that, I guess). That’s not something I care a lot about, but if you did care about that, an iPhone is clearly your best bet.

My overall impression remains the same. This is a tremendous phone.