HTC Droid Incredible Review

The Incredible has a vibrant, 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touch display with WVGA (480x800) resolution. The screen supports multi-touch functionality and responds very quickly. Our only complaints with the screen are that it's a bit difficult to read in bright sunlight and it tends to attract some fingerprints, though prints don't seem to affect performance. The phone's accelerometer is pretty quick to respond when rotating the handset.

The Incredible boasts of an 8MP camera that can also record video. Many of the pictures we took indoors and outdoors turned out well, and there wasn't a lot of shutter lag. That said, we're not willing to give up our point-and-shoot camera yet. The Incredible's camera did a good job, but some images appeared blurry and the dual LED flash washed out some of the detail in our images. We'll attribute the blurriness in some of our images to the fact that the camera often focused and locked in on our subject but it was difficult, if not impossible, to hold the camera perfectly steady after focusing and press the small optical joystick to take the picture. Video recording quality was good, but the results were on the grainy side.

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As far as call quality is concerned, we enjoyed clear conversations and did not have any dropped calls. Both the earpiece and the speakerphone were plenty loud, and the people we spoke with never complained about the quality on their side of the conversation. Like many phones these days, the Incredible has a proximity sensor that will automatically turn the display on and off when you move the phone close to your ear and it will turn the screen back on when you pull it away.

By far the best feature of the Incredible during our tests with was the speediness of the handset. This smartphone has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM, and 512MB of ROM. The HTC Incredible was one of the fastest smartphones we've tested to date and it handled various apps simultaneously without issue.

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As far as navigation is concerned, we appreciated the ease of use and convenience of the Leap interface with various home screens. The phone's touch-sensitive screen was quick to respond and the multi-touch functionality worked very well. The optical joystick isn't very large, so we often had to swipe our finger across it multiple times to scroll through a webpage. As a result, scrolling in the web browser using the optical joystick felt a little awkward. More often than not, we found ourselves using the touchscreen for navigation rather than the optical joystick, but it's still nice to have both options. While browsing the web, the optical joystick was especially useful for selecting a single link within a list of links or other small items on a page.

HTC claims you should expect up to 5 hours and 13 minutes of talk time on the Incredible's user replaceable battery. Overall, we were satisfied with the Incredible's battery life and were generally able to get a day’s worth of use from the phone while making calls, surfing the Web, and performing other tasks. Of course, your experience may vary depending on how aggressively you use the phone’s capabilities.