HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE (Verizon Wireless)

No, this isn't one of the HTC 'One' Phones. Rather than keep the One design and slap a new name on it, like Sprint mostly did with the HTC EVO 4G LTE?($199.99, 4 stars), Verizon and HTC are going for something different here. The $149.99 HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE is more of an honest-to-goodness follow-up to the HTC Droid Incredible 2?(3.5 stars) than it is an extension of HTC's top-tier new One brand. That's both good and bad.

The Droid Incredible 4G LTE retains the same general shape and size of its predecessors, which is great news for anyone that isn't keen on the super large, hand-busting new smartphone trend. On the other hand, the Incredible eschews some of the best features from the One line, like a faster 1.5GHz processor and HTC's ImageSense camera processor. The Droid Incredible is still a very good smartphone?it's just a notch below the One.

Design and Call Quality
The Incredible 4G LTE measures 4.8 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.8 ounces. It might sound silly, but size is probably the primary reason to get this phone. While other top smartphones tend to rely on the idea that bigger is better, the truth is, phones with a 4-inch display are just more comfortable to hold if you have average size hands. The Incredible is a little thick, but it has a solid feel, with a textured, rubberized black panel. The glass front of the phone is surrounded by a thin, shiny black plastic band, and there are red accents around the camera sensor, on the Power button, and on the speaker grill for the earpiece. All told, it looks a lot like the original Droid Incredible?(4.5 stars).

The 4-inch qHD Super LCD features 960-by-540-pixel resolution. That's not quite on par with the brilliant 720p display on the HTC Rezound ($199.99, 4 stars), but it still looks sharp and bright. And despite the phone's smaller-than-average stature, typing feels fine on the onscreen keyboard.

The Incredible is a dual-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900 MHz) and single-band LTE (700MHz) device with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. Data speeds are excellent on Verizon's 4G LTE network, which recently led the pack in our testing for the?Fastest Mobile Networks. Download speeds averaged close to 10Mbps on the Incredible, while upload speeds were around 8.5Mbps. You can use it as a mobile hotspot to share that data with up to 10 connected devices with the appropriate plan. And if you're looking to conserve data, the Incredible connected to my WPA2-encrypted Wi-Fi network without a problem.

Voice quality is a strong point. Voices sound loud and clear in the phone's earpiece, if a bit digitized. Calls made with the phone are equally easy to hear, with a natural quality and good noise cancellation. Calls were fine through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars) and voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth. The speakerphone sounds okay, and volume goes loud enough to use it outdoors. The 1700mAh battery was good for a solid 8 hours and 43 minutes of talk time.

Hardware, OS, and HTC Sense 4
The Incredible uses the same dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chip as the HTC One X?($199.99, 4.5 stars), except here it's clocked at 1.2GHz instead of 1.5GHz. That still makes for fast mobile performance?just not quite as fast as the One phones or the Samsung Galaxy S III ($199.99-$249.99). Still, you'll be able to run all of the apps and games available in the Google Play store without a problem.

Android 4.0.3 is on board here, along with HTC Sense 4.0. Sense 4.0 is a much lighter implementation of HTC's UI overlay than we've seen before, and very enjoyable to use. You get seven customizable home screens to swipe between. They come preloaded with some helpful apps and widgets, along with a hefty 15 items of bloatware from Verizon. None of the bloatware is deletable, but it didn't seem to impact performance.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ycGE17wx4sU/0,2817,2406750,00.asp

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