Hands-On Demo Time with the HTC Droid Incredible Smartphone
We're back again with the HTC Droid Incredible smartphone for Verizon Wireless, and we want to give you a little bit more Hands-On demo time with the device. But what's really interesting is that we'll also be comparing it to Apple's new iPhone 4 in terms of features, performance, and functionality.
The HTC Droid Incredible is based on a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and the Android 2.1 operating system. What really sets this phone apart, however, is HTC's Sense Touch user interface. Swipe down the unlock bar on the screen, and you're greeted with a nice animation of today's weather on the home screen – partly sunny skies and scenic Massachusetts. This is indeed the world headquarters for HHardware.com.
The device boasts a 3.7-inch AMOLED touch-sensitive screen with a native resolution of 480x800 pixels. The earpiece is located on the right side, and there are four buttons down the bottom: search, back, like web browser, and perhaps navigating back through applications; a menu button; and a home screen button. Additionally, there's an optical joystick reminiscent of track ball users, as well as a micro USB port, standard volume rocker, headphone jack, and power button on the side and top, respectively.
One of the standout features of this device is its 8-megapixel digital camera with flash and video capabilities. The camera application allows you to select different modes – photo and video mode, for example – adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness, and even apply effects like grayscale, sepia, negative, solarize, etc. Simply tap on the screen to focus, then press the optical joystick to snap a picture.
We'll take a look at some of the applications and software side of the HTC Droid Incredible next. The home screen is nicely organized and comes with standard apps and widgets already installed – the Droid Marketplace, web browser, contact manager, messaging services, email, and camera app, among others. These can be customized to your liking by adding or removing widgets directly on your home screen for quick access.
Let's fire up the internet browser and take a closer look at its features. The browser is quite nice, with standard issue album jacket view in the music player interface we'll explore later – but first, let's multitask and play some music while checking Gmail. For those who may not be familiar with this device, the music player interface offers standard player functions like forward and back buttons to skip tracks, as well as swipe motions to navigate through track tiles.
Moving on, let's give you a quick look at the contact manager, which is actually quite nice. You can set a default ringtone for any contact, send that person directly to voicemail every time they call in (hopefully not doing that to me), and even chat with them via text or check their updates on Facebook and Flickr.
We'll also explore some other features like mail and the music player interface. The email app is quite intuitive, with good typing capability and keyboard functionality, including autocomplete functions and tactile feedback response for every key hit. It's a shame that scrolling down to the bottom of an email to get to reply, forward, or reply all buttons can be a bit inconvenient.
Last but not least, we'll leave you with some final thoughts on this device. Overall, the HTC Droid Incredible is a nicely appointed smartphone with many features and functions that make it stand out from other devices in its class. We hope you've enjoyed our hands-on demo time with this device, and be sure to stop by HHardware.com for the full review.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi it's Dave alila for hybrid.com and we're back again with the HTC Droid Incredible smartphone for Verizon Wireless want to give you a little bit more Hands-On demo time with the device but also compare it to Apple's new iPhone 4 in terms of features performance and functionality we'll take a look at the iPhone 4 in our next video segment but for now let's take a look at the HTC Droid Incredible it's based on a 1 GHz qu alcom Snapdragon processor and the Android 2.1 operating system but what really sets this phone apart is HTC's sense touch user interface swipe down the unlock bar on the screen and you're greeted with a nice animation of today's weather on the home screen partly sunny skies and Scenic Massachusetts here world headquarters for H hardware.com but a really nice 3.7 in Amo LED touch sensitive screen with a native resolution of 480x 800 on the front face of the device device is the earpiece right here and it's actually kind of a red mesh screen there's four buttons down the bottom here for search back for like web browser back or perhaps navigating back through applications a menu button and a home screen button then there's also an optical joystick sort of reminiscent in terms of placement and functionality for track ball users perhaps you Blackberry folks in the audience and uh over here is a micro USB port uh standard volume Rock ER okay on the side up and down and on the top is a headphone jack and a power button on the back of the device is an 8 megapixel digital camera with flash and it also takes video so nicely equipped and let's take a look at some of the applications and software side of the HTC Droid Incredible next the home screen on the HTC Droid Incredible is nicely organized and it comes with some standard app and widgets already installed in the home screen things like the Droid marketplace the web browser your contact manager messaging services email and the camera app are all pre-installed on the home screen but you can go ahead and customize any number of widgets to be installed directly on your home screen for quick access things like Facebook calendar bookmarks analog clock whatever your heart desires there's a number of different apps available and of course you can download more from the Droid marketplace but you can install them directly on the home screen let's fire up the internet browser and we'll show you how the browser renders uh hot hardware.com and it's actually pretty Snappy um as you'll notice it's also rendering our flash ads um and so flash is supported in the web browser and as you can see standard uh swipe uh expand and pinch uh zooming capabilities with uh multi-touch and very responsive we're going to click over over to another web page here on the site and we're over an 80211 N wireless connection right now and as you can see things are rendering quite fluidly and quickly and uh pinch and zoom is just you know it's right there it's really responsive and finally one of the nicer features of the web browser application is if you tap this menu button here up Pops a number of different navigational elements like back and forward and add a bookmark but you can also tap the Windows button which allows you to quickly flick through any number of different instances of the web application web browser application that you happen to have open previously you can quickly snap to that page that you had open so real nice functionality for the web browser app and of course you can also change orientation of the device and have it render horizontally or vertically on the page and the accelerometer is actually pretty responsive okay so here we are in the HTC Droid Incredibles camera application and it's actually really nicely set up you can see we can select different modes we got photo and video mode again this is an 8 megapixel camera uh you can adjust brightness you can adjust contrast saturation and sharpness and you can even apply different effects to the photo as well grayscale sepia negative solariz Etc so some really nice features there you just tap on the screen to focus it and then press the optical joystick to snap the picture okay so here we are on the home screen again and let's go ahead and make this pinch motion and we can show you the extended home screen and what this is is sort of a predefined set of home screens if you will for things like maybe you want to load in a contact that uh is always readily available or perhaps some settings that you want to get to like turning off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and again these are all available on different tiles and what HTC calls the extended home screen let's go back to the main home screen now and we can hit this up arrow and now we can see all of the apps that we have installed on the device and as you can see we've got a number of different things from Gmail to Facebook to the FM radio player all available from this menu here going back to the home screen let's look at some standard applications that come with the device let's look at the contact manager it's actually quite nice I'm going to pull up my personal contact and here you can do things like set a default ringtone for that contact you can go ahead and send that person directly to voicemail every time they call in uh hopefully you're not doing that to me but that's a setting you can put on any contact and you can go ahead and chat with them uh via text or you can go ahead and send an email or you can even check their updates on Facebook and flicker so some nice features already pre-built in to the HTC Droid Incredible let's look at some other features like mail and the music player next okay and finally let's give you a quick look at the music player interface on the HTC Droid Incredible but we'll also do a little bit of multitasking we'll play some music while we check Gmail first here's the player interface standard issue album jacket view here um but you also can view your entire library from an artist view from an albums view from a playlist view we haven't created any playlist yet or from an entire Library view just listed alphabetically and you can go ahead and scroll through pick a song we've got some vintage Audio Slave here and standard player functions like forward and back buttons to skip tracks um so nothing Earth shattering there but um you know it's actually a a nicely appointed music player interface and you also can skip through tracks with this swipe motion as well and flip through track tiles that way so again a a nicely appointed music player interface we'll leave some Jack Johnson going here in the background not too loud skip back to our Gmail app and we've already actually pulled up an email but here's an email here and let's go back to the beginning of it unfortunately you have to scroll down to the bottom of an email to get to the reply reply out or forward buttons so a little bit inconvenient there but let's go ahead and reply and the Cordy keyboard comes back up and of course you can view this horizontally or vertically portrait a landscape mode there and it changes orientation depending on the direction the keyboard itself is uh very tactile uh autocomplete functions are there um and uh it gives you a quick little vibrate uh feedback response every time you hit a key so nice functionality with the keyboard and uh you know good typing capability with the the interface on the HTC Droid Incredible for Verizon Wireless I'm Dave altavilla for H hardware.com stop by the site for the full review and thanks again for stopping by\n"
