Review: HTC proves credible over Incredible

By RACHEL METZ

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO

Naming a cell phone “Incredible” is audacious: Even if the device has all the bells and whistles, it might not be incredibly easy or fun to use.

It turns out Taiwan’s HTC Corp. can back up the claim. Its Droid Incredible, which will be available Thursday from Verizon Wireless, combines a brilliant screen, Google’s Android operating software, a great camera and slick design in a thin, light package — all the ingredients for a fab phone. It’s $200 with a two-year contract.

The more ubiquitous smart phones get, the more they all seem to resemble shiny black slabs. The Incredible manages to pop out with some unique styling.

The back of the phone, usually a boring, mostly blank slate, looks like three stacked layers of matte plastic, reminiscent of a topographical map or, perhaps, a futuristic droid. Its front speaker and the rim around the camera lens on its back are both metallic red, and if you pop open the battery case you’ll find cherry-colored insides and a red battery, too.

Like another handset made by HTC, Google Inc.’s Nexus One, and like Motorola Inc.’s original Droid, the Incredible has a crisp, responsive and spacious screen — 3.7 inches diagonally, which is slightly bigger than the iPhone (3.5 inches).

Unlike those other Android phones, though, the Incredible responds to multiple finger gestures, much like the “multitouch” technology on the iPhone. The black area below the screen and the mechanical button at the bottom of the face are also touch-sensitive, so you can swipe your finger across this area or simply pass it over the button to, say, toggle through functions within your address book.

The combination of the great screen and finger-gesture capabilities made surfing the Web, viewing photos and reading e-mails a pleasure.

The Incredible doesn’t fully support Flash technology, which many sites require for displaying video. Rather, it supports Flash Lite 4, which means that you will be able to view some Flash content but not all. Videos on several Web sites I tried, such as Hulu, wouldn’t load, for example. (Like other Android phones, the Incredible includes a YouTube app, so you can still watch videos through that).

As on the Nexus One, the Incredible runs the Android 2.1 operating software, also called Eclair, which is an update of the software that comes on the Motorola Droid. It’s simple to find your way around and includes an on-screen keyboard (there’s no physical keyboard on this device). As with the Nexus One and Droid, you’ll get Google’s turn-by-turn GPS navigation.

There are plenty of applications included on the phone, such as HTC’s Friend Stream for aggregating all your friends’ updates to social sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. And you have access to the Android Market for downloading as many free and paid apps as you want.

While many smart phones eschew internal storage in favor of a microSD memory card, the Incredible includes 8 gigabytes of memory, which is plenty of space for storing apps, as well as photos, music and videos. It also has a memory card slot in case you want even more storage.