Almost Incredible except for...

I summarize my month long experience with HTC incredible:

I had been waiting to get a smartphone for some time. So when I heard about the latest and greatest droid in the market, I got one finally (or so I thought).

Out of the box: the phone looked great. The display is really nice. Having multiple home screens is great (unlike iphone). The weather feature is interesting. The camera is awesome (though don't think 8mp real camera).

The keypad is nice with some kind of haptic feedback. The voice to text feature of keypad means you don't need to use keypad if using standard english. It is that good.

The phone is blazing fast. Very responsive compared to both droid DOES and iphone. And verizon network was better than ATT as well.

Now the not so good stuff: The voice mail had some shrill. Then I realized that the voice quality was in general bad when calling. The phone heated up little when used. Iphone and Motorola droid(DOES) don't seem to heatup. Heated up significantly when being charged and more if used while charging.

I was somewhat surprised to find that there is no voice dial or speed dial feature in true sense. You had click in three places to ready the phone for voice dial or speed dial, which kind of defeats the purpose.

The phone is sleeker than iphone but is still pretty big compared to non-smartphones. Looked frail so I put a sleeve on it and then it would not slide properly in my pocket. I bought the holder but hated using it. This is something for all first time smartphone buyers to think about.

I went back to the store and they immediately confirmed that the voice quality had issue. So I got a refurbished phone in exchange. I did not like paying for a new phone and getting a refurbished phone. The voice quality had improved but still had issues esp when accessing voice mail for some reason. I blamed it on my imagination. The replacement phone somehow seemed to have lower bars. Almost always a single bar unlike the previous phone. The only place I got the full bars was at the airport.

The battery life is very bad. I thought I used it very carefully (which again takes away from the always on, always available sense of mobility) and still had to charge frequently. On a busy day it would have definitely proved unreliable.

I just needed a robust phone first. True this phone is loaded with lot of smart features but I paid higher price for those features in terms of initial price and data plan. So I was less willing to except deficiencies in basic functions that I value every day.

Anyway the last straw happened to be the rebate. The replacement phone did not come in a new box and hence I was not able to claim the rebate. Calling customer service and visiting verizon store to explain the situation did not help. So I returned the phone as it was still in 'no-worry' period.