Intro:
The droid Incredible 2 was announced and I remember thinking that it couldn’t be better or even as good. I was kind of wrong. I think this could be something
Looks
In the looks department… This is an incredible with a few upgrades. This one has a front camera and of course the old one does not. There are a few other subtle things, one of the others is the LED buttons, they move if you have the phone in portrait or landscape. One other funny thing is that the back plating and battery are no longer red! Not a big deal, nothing anyone will notice, but it was something I found.
Hardware
This device comes with a Single core, Qualcomm MSM8655 which is qualified as a Snapdragon and comes in at 1000 MHz. So with that being said it is a pretty powerful beast. I have found it to have great speed, pretty close to the original. It also comes with 768 MB of RAM which is better than the 512 the original Droid Incredible had. 16 Gb of memory is built-in and up to 32 can be added with an SD card.
Screen
The screen is a capacitive touch, 4 inch screen that supports 480 x 800 pixels. The resolution is pretty great and the actual glass makes the screen quite clear. It is bright in quite a few situations. I never really had a problem with the screen.
Battery
The battery is rated at 6.50 hours of talk and 361 hours of standby, I can get 6 – 8 hours of good used out of it. So over all this battery is like most out there right now. It has the power to last and not much more, I am still personally waiting for an 18 hour device, but for me this wasn’t it. That doesn’t mean it is bad at all, it is very standard and standard is great.
Operating System/Software
Android 2.2 as well as HTC sense (not the new version that the sensation has). This phone is likely not getting that new version from HTC or Google either. From rumors going around this phone will get updated with different versions of android, and will likely get some form of 2.3, that isn’t something you can deny… it just won’t likely get the new sense as I’ve heard it requires a dual core device to fully utilize all features.
Key Board
The keyboard is standard HTC, I am not a fan of the HTC keyboard and usually switch out, this was the case today as well. I just don’t much like it. I prefer a keyboard that will space for me after I select the word with corrective text. The keyboard also doesn’t feel as natural. I can not say that I would ever recommend this phone to someone for the keyboard, if you ask me, all phones should come with swype or a swiping ability.
Web Browsing, Camera and Video
The web browser on this is pretty standard, until Honeycomb or Ice Cream comes to phones, we will not see much change in the browser, and if HTC keeps things going the way that they have, we may not even see a change then. That being said, this is the HTC sense browser, a browser that has lots of speed and is easy to use, it is like many other phones browsers. Video recording is great, full 720p HD from the 8mp rear camera. The front camera is not bad either, the front camera is an upgrade from the original.
Call/Data Quality
The calls were clear, I never once dropped a call. The data was good, Verizon gives a good 3G experience. There is no 4G LTE on this device so don’t expect top speeds, but it is fast.
Pros:
- HTC Sense is good
- This phone has a clean design
- Great Camera and Video quality
- Android 2.2
Cons:
- The HTC keyboard is not good
- No Hard Keyboard
- Not packaged with 2.3 which would have been nice with the front camera
Conclusions and Final Thoughts
I enjoyed this phone. It is a good upgrade but I am not sure if it is good enough if you already have an incredible. Maybe from a smaller phone or a less powerful device, but the incredible to the incredible 2 just isn’t a good enough upgrade and there aren’t enough big things to push this over the top for me.
Check out my Review of the Original Incredible here
Images