I finally have it! After waiting for what seams like forever the HTC Incredible is in mine hands. So I thought I would share some of my thoughts. My last phone was a Blackberry Storm which I will contrast with the Incredible.
Physical:
The phone has a 3.7 inch screen which is quite a bit larger than the Storm and the resolution is very good. I loaded a couple of movies onto the phone and they looked very good and something I look forward to using on my next trip. The weight of the phone is very light compared to the Storm and is comparable to the iPhone. The front has no physical buttons and the optical trackball is very easy to use. The corners are a bit squared off. When you put in your hand it isn't as comfortable as other phones. The back of the phone looks like a topology map. It has the HTC and Google labels printed on the back. The camera, which is an outstanding 8 Mega pixel, has a curious red ring around it along with the dual LED flash.
For Style I would give the phone a B -
For layout and functionality an A
Tech Specs:
This is where the phone really shines. It has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor which is very fast compared to the Blackberry Storm and even the Motorola Droid. There is virtually no lag time in any of the applications. I am very impressed with the speed. The internet on the Incredible comes up even a little bit faster that the desktop I have at work. Playing videos has no lag and you can smoothly skip through videos without a pause. Flipping through the different screens is very seamless.
The camera is again an amazing 8 Mega pixels which is tops of any phone on the market today. You can also take videos with the camera as well with pretty good quality. Although the ability to record in 720 would of been nice the video is still very enjoyable.
The GPS had no problem picking up satellites and was very quick in doing so. The FM tuner was nice addition, but only works with a headset plugged in. The voice search commands is a pretty cool feature. It lets you search by speaking into the phone. It worked pretty well for the most part. Another cool feature is the Wi-Fi connection which allows you to connect right into your LAN and gain local access to your network.
For the Incredible Hardware Guts an A+
Usability:
The use of the phone is a dream. It has a ton of applications already loaded on it and the customization you can do is simply incredible. The Google Android OS 2.1 is really nice but with the Incredible gives you Sense UI from HTC. This allows for a lot more pages through the use of "scenes" It comes by default seven scenes with titles like Travel and Play. I believe the thought was to change to a different scene when you change to a different activity. Another option is the Live Wallpapers that are animated and react to your touch. My favorite is called Water. When you touch it the pool of water reacts like you dropped a rock into it.
The phone itself is crystal clear according to the people I have talked to on it. Email setup with Exchange and POP accounts were a breeze. The Email look so much better than the Storm. The ability to see conversations, which allows you to group associated emails together is a handy feature. There are two ways of looking through the email. One is the standard list and then the other is to flip through them with a flick of the finger. The weather widget is pretty neat and shows you the standard temp, sky conditions and forecast. The calendar synced up with Outlook without an issue and shows the events on a month view or list view. The media player is nice but nothing groundbreaking about that. There are many more programs but that is a run down of the main ones. Of course you can go to the Android marketplace and download many more.
Probably the coolest features of the phone is the Navigation with Google maps. My friend Kirk and I had to take it for a spin and after our short trip there is no reason to purchase a GPS system if you have this phone. The turn by turn navigation worked just fine, but what this has over any GPS system is two fold. First you have Google Street view which shows you exactly what your trip will appear like. The second is the ability to add layers. You can add gas stations, hotels, restaurants layers and they appear right on the map. So if you ever get lost or run out of gas with the Incredible you might need to go back to school since it is so bloody brilliant.
For Usability I give it a solid A
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