Need a global phone? Do you travel outside of the country at all? The Incredible 2 may be the choice for you! It gives you everything that you need in a smart-phone, ON-THE-GO!
Phone
The Incredible 2 is extremely similar to the original Incredible, there is some small features that make it look slightly different. The signature red accents are missing. I noticed a significant weight different between the original Incredible and the Incredible 2.
The Incredible will link Facebook data (contact’s photo and profile info) in the address book however it is a few extra clicks to make it all link. There is also a favorite callers list that can be used as one of your five screens. Having it set up as a widget makes it quick one touch access to dial some of your favorite people!
The clarity of the phone is good I had no problems with people being able to hear me.
The Incredible 2 is a 3G phone which is a question I received numerous times, “why should I get a 3G phone when I can get a 4G LTE for the same price.” The phone is great and the speed of the phone is top notch, there is no reason not to get this phone, especially if you need a global devise with amazing speed and all the functions that we love and can’t do without in our smart-phones!
Design
The Incredible 2 is the same as it predecessor HTC Incredible. It has a Snapdragon 1GHz processor which is extremely fast and a Qualcomm MSM 8655 processor for amazing web browsing speeds. Even when running multiple apps at the same time or using the browser, it never seemed to lag.
It also has the built in voice input on any text field and it works very well as long as you are not in an area with large amounts of background noise or in a car with road noise, them it will not pick it up.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, a power/sleep button on top right side and a volume rocker on the left side and Micro USB connection on the left side.
There are quick launch touch keys for menu, back, home and search below the screen.
Display
The screen on the Incredible 2 is a 4-inch, 480-by-800 pixel WVGA display. However, visibility in bright daylight was mediocre. Under overcast skies, the screen was usually fine.
Camera
The camera is an 8 megapixel on the rear of the devise with a 720p recording capabilities and a 1.3 front-facing VGA camera on the front of the phone. It features auto-focus as well as a dual led flash.
It took bright, vivid pictures in natural light. But, in low light, the dual-LED flash washed out most photos – especially objects that were close to the camera. It also takes a few seconds to focus on the object if you are to close to it. It also has a facial recognition feature as well as auto focus to help focus on the person in the picture.
The video recorder captures 720p HD video. With the 1.3 MP front facing camera it makes it simple to video chat with your friends.
Battery Life
I’ve concluded that I’m going to have to charge my phone every day. This is the case with whatever phone I’m using. I did notice on the Incredible 2 that they did seem to work on the battery slightly, although I didn’t have near the number of apps running that I normally do, but the battery had NO trouble lasting me though the day. I did manage to go two full days without charging it but by the end of day two it was in desperate need of a charge! I am sure if I ran it like I do my personal devise I would have never gotten away with 2 days of battery but, it does still seem to last longer.
Interface
Android 2.2 HTC Sense on the Incredible 2 runs five home screens. Tapping the home key from any home screen gives you an iconic view of all five screens. It’s the same as its counterpart the origional Droid Incredible.
The phone never slowed and scrolling between pages or up and down long lists happened without hesitation. The user interface is wickedly fast and responsive.
Voice-to-Text used to only be available for Google Search. Now, you can use voice-to-text almost anywhere that requires text-input including writing text messages and E-mail, however make sure there is not a lot of background noise.
Web
In regard to the HTC browser, it works great and renders web pages very fast. It is integrated with Flash 10.1 for web browsing so viewing most sites with flash files is not a problem.
You can pinch-zoom pages in as far as you want, you get a nice screen shot of bookmarked pages, and they can all be viewed in landscape or vertical configurations.
Conclusion
I was excited to see the difference between the original Droid Incredible and the Incredible 2. I really enjoy the way HTC has put its own spin on the Android OS, it makes it so much more user friendly!
I have family and friends who have the Motorola X and even though it is the Android OS there have been times that various small things have stumped me compared to the HTC.
I was concerned about the optical joystick, or the lack of, for the Incredible 2 but it didn’t seem to bother me once I got into it because HTC has included arrow buttons on the right side of the keyboard. This makes it easier to go back to various items with out the use of the optical joystick and it was a rather smooth transition.
There is one thing that I found I really did not like about the Thunderbolt and that is the placement of the volume rocker. Every-time I would use the phone in landscape mode I would hit the rocker and shut the volume off and didn’t even realize it sometimes which in turn caused me to miss calls/texts/etc!
Specs
Processor: Qualcomm MSM8655, 1 GHz Snapdragon
Storage: 16 GB SD card preinstalled
Screen: 4.0-inch WVGA
Camera: 8MP rear with dual LED flash with 720p HD recording and 1.3 front facing camera
Audio: 3.5mm headset jack
Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, Accelerometer
Weight: 4.77 ounces
Bundled apps: Backup Assistant; Android Market; Google Talk; Amazon Kindle; Mobile IM; Visual Voice Maill; Verizon Single Sign On; Blockbuster; Slacker Radio; VZ Navigator; Tune Wiki; Vz Web Portal (Browser Favorite); eReader; SSO; VCast App Store; City ID; FM Radio (headphones are needed); Free Google Navigation (turn-by-turn navigation); 3G Mobile Hot Spot; NSF Shift; Skype 3G; Lets Golf 2
*Opinion Piece Author: Kristina Russo, NBC25 Account Executive
