Battery Life & Final Words

Battery Life

The HTC Incredible gave me a strange mix of great and terrible battery life in my tests. While 3G talk time was nearly 6 hours (HTC’s specs were actually very accurate here), its 3G web browsing battery life was abysmal. WiFi battery life was considerably better but still not on par with the iPhone 3GS.

The 3G data battery life is a bit perplexing and I’m not sure if it’s a side effect of using the Verizon network or simply the reception at my office. I’m not convinced it’s a problem with my location since the 3G talk time was just fine and roughly three hours of intense data use lined up with my experiences outside the office. Either way, don’t expect anything great from the Incredible’s battery life. Although like I said, points for good talk time.

Final Words

I like the Incredible. If you are on Verizon it’s probably the best option you can get for the network. HTC delivers a much more polished and complete feel than Google does with the Nexus One. This is largely due to the improved functionality of the Sense UI and apps/widgets. It’s also a result of the Incredible being ridiculously fast in interacting with the OS thanks to whatever optimizations HTC has done. The camera is nice and is augmented well by HTC’s camera app. I wouldn’t recommend throwing away your point and shoot but it is good enough to be the only camera in your pocket on a vacation if you don’t mind some grain in your shots. The keyboard is like night and day compared to the Nexus One’s solution. It’s just so much better. My device-level complaints are limited to the cheap feeling back cover and poor battery life. HTC has built a good Android smartphone. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but it’s good.

The Android v. iPhone dilemma I brought up in the Nexus One review still stands. In this case, it’s perfectly exemplified by the HTC Droid Incredible’s keyboard. On the left you’ve got Android and on the right, the iPhone OS:

Both will get you from point A to point B, Apple just does it cleaner, Google does it with more flexibility. Choosing between the two really depends on what you want from your smartphone. Apps like Goggles and fully supported tethering are Android only features at this point. Flexibility in where you get your apps from, and how you can customize your OS are as well. The Apple approach is much more focused on a clean user experience. Things like a single switch to silence your phone and delivering a consistent user experience throughout all apps. The functionality is more limited, but the UI isn’t nearly as cluttered.

I honestly doubt if there are many folks who are on the fence between the two. Spending a bit of time with both devices will quickly let you know if you fall into the Google or Apple camp. Both have their issues and limitations. I don’t believe any smartphone platform is perfect at this point, although all players are rushing to get there as quickly as possible (Palm is a viable competitor as well, if HP doesn’t kill it).

What HTC has done is provided the best hardware platform for Android to date so that those users who have to choose between Apple and Google at least have a good representative from the Android camp. With some app consolidation, some additional features (e.g. server side email search for non-Gmail accounts) and a simplified Sense scene I’m confident we could see a HTC phone that even delivers the same clean user experience as an iPhone. Then you wouldn’t even have to choose.

HTC seems to get the importance of marrying the hardware to the software. It makes me wonder if HTC made the wrong move by not buying Palm. Android is a great platform but ultimately Google is trying to be the Microsoft of the smartphone space. And we all know how that worked out for the PC OEMs; they ship a ton of systems and Apple makes all the money.

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