Saturday, May 19, 2012

The Incredible 2 Seems Like A Worthy Successor

HTC gave us instead was the Droid Incredible, with the same 1GHz Snapdragon CPU and gorgeous 3.7-inch AMOLED display -- not to mention a better camera (8 megapixel vs. five), 8GB of built-in flash storage, an optical trackpad, HTC's Sense UI on top of Eclair, and a dash of funky industrial design. With a 4-inch Super LCD display, global CDMA / GSM radio, front-facing camera, updated internals (including 768 MB of RAM), trick capacitive buttons, and a Froyo-flavored serving of Sense, the Incredible 2 seems like a worthy successor to last year's Incredible.



There's no doubt that the Incredible 2 is an extremely handsome, if not sightly austere looking handset. The back cover features the same grippy soft-touch finish and unique layered motif as the Incredible, but instead of two "steps", there's only one this time around. Like the HTC ThunderBolt, the Incredible 2 includes contacts (missing from the Incredible S) for an optional inductive charging back, and integrates some of its antennae into the battery door. The layout is almost identical to its forebear -- the headphone jack and power button have swapped places, and the camera flash is now arranged horizontally instead of vertically. On the left side you'll find the volume rocker and micro-USB connector while the right side is devoid of any controls. The top edge hosts the power button, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, plus a secondary mic, while the bottom edge hides the primary mic, along with an indent to pry the battery cover off.

Accompanying the VGA front camera is an 8 megapixel camera on the back with two LED flashes to the right of it. These work well enough but we’ll talk more about it in the camera section. Color balance and exposure are top notch. Low-light performance is impressive. Noise is kept under control without compromising detail. the camera simply gathers a tremendous amount of information, resulting in amazing shots.

Much like the hardware, there’s not much going on software-wise (if you’ve used HTC Sense already, anyway). There are no huge surprises here. In fact, I’m more surprised by the fact that HTC Droid Incredible 2 repair services chose not to include full-on Sense 2.1 as they have in several of their phones in the “S” series released in Europe. I won’t knock them too much on that fact, though, as as the only thing that’s missing from that version is the settings tab inside the notification pane. I imagine 2.1 will come once the device is upgraded to Gingerbread. (It currently runs Android 2.2.)



Everything else is still quite nice, though. Your most recent apps show up at the top of the notification pane, your launcher separates your apps from HTC’s and Verizon’s and you can customize the device with Skins. Another change to HTC Incredible S repair parts that I haven’t recognized before is the ability to customize the tabs at the bottom of various applications.

In the end, the Incredible 2 isn't a fish in the sea of Android -- it's a shark seeing Verizon red and ready to devour the competition. Considering how much of a runaway hit the original Incredible was last summer, perhaps HTC should have called this new version the Jaws 2?




No comments:

Post a Comment