First impressions of the HTC Incredible and why I left iPhone...

I recently switched my mobile service from AT&T Wireless and the iPhone, to Verizon and the brand new HTC Incredible.

Why did I switch? I've been a customer of AT&T / Cingular / AT&T for over a decade. I've usually had great service and great phones. I've also had a wide variety of phones from the iPhone to the BlackJack II, to the Cingular 8125, to any number of flip and candybar style phones. At one point I was getting a new phone every year - until I got the iPhone.

The iPhone is the phone I've had the longest, because it pretty much did everything I needed it to do. The problem was that AT&T didn't.

For some time now I've been growing frustrated with dropped calls and lack of signal in places where I don't expect there to be a problem. Sitting in a cafe in midtown Sacramento and the phone telling me it's "searching" for a signal is displeasing to me. I was also hearing great things about the Android phones (Nexus One, DROID, etc.) including the brand new HTC Incredible that was on its way to market.

And so I did some research and made the switch!

First impressions? The phone gets pretty close to living up to its lofty name.

It started out as the HTC Wow! as I began to explore the differences from the iPhone and was filled with excitement. It was all new and it was all fresh, and I enjoyed figuring out what it could do in an of itself, and what it could do that was better than other phones. It's got a fast 1GHz processor, 8MP camera, wireless/GPS/bluetooth, Flash (which is a BIG win over the iPhone), customizable everything, live widgets (sort of like Google desktop), and more!

Then I moved into HTC Uh Oh! when I encountered a known issue with the native email client and IMAP email servers. There is no fix that I've seen so far and I had to install a different email program (K9) in order to get consistent access to my IMAP email accounts. Ok not TOO bad but still was unexpected, because on the iPhone it just "worked". I was also concerned with the native Twitter app called "Peep". It kept notifying me about messages I'd received days in the past - so I installed the brand new native Twitter app and removed Peep and all was well. The final part of my uh oh was that tethering isn't native. You not only have to download software, but there's a fee with Verizon to enable mobile tethering. AT&T didn't even offer it on the iPhone unless you were jailbroken, but I don't understand why this is an extra monthly charge and I dislike it.

Then I phased into HTC Really Good! as I got email working and started to customize my home screens with the applications I use on a regular basis. Things like Google Voice (which deserves it's own mention in a moment), Facebook, Twitter, Ustream broadcaster, Amazon, Wordpress, music streaming, NPR News, TMZ, and a few others including a Bejeweled clone. Battery life popped up as a possible down-side, and I've heard this complaint from other users - but I charge the phone every night and I've turned off the constant GPS fix option and it seems to help. At this point - not enough to drop me out of Really Good.

And then it was time for HTC Wow! again when I realized just how amazingly integrated Google Voice was on the Android system. No longer was it just an app on the iPhone that connected me to my web-based Google Voice account, now it was so integrated that it can actually bypass my phone's native voicemail and send it to Google Voice. This was a special wow because Verizon charges for visual voicemail (note that AT&T does not - it's part of the package). I didn't want to pay for that feature because it was just a nice to have, but I was super pleased that Google Voice can take care of it for me (including transcription and the other awesome features of the tool).

I've finally settled at HTC Great! after about a week of using the phone. Some of the initial issues I experienced, plus the concern about battery life have kept me from reaching the full HTC Incredible! level for myself. It seems as though HTC is paying attention - they have already released an Over the Air update that fixes a potential issue with incorrectly showing service bars - so I'm hoping that updates are going to be regular and beneficial. I love that it happens over the air vs. having to tether to iTunes to do an update.

I love that I can customize every single screen (I'm currently using a 7-screen theme); add live widgets that can show weather, calendars, email previews, facebook updates, twitter updates, and pretty much anything else; the touch screen is intuitive and responsive; and it's just easy to use and personalize to my specific needs.

Having a phone that can be so personalized is a welcome change from the iPhone that wouldn't even let me have persistent wallpaper on anything but the home screen (something that never made sense to me but is apparently being fixed in the 4.0 software release). But that personalization can have tradeoffs. You can load this thing up with so many applications and so many widgets that it becomes unusable, so you do have to watch what you're doing.

In terms of form factor it's very similar to the iPhone but doesn't feel as heavy. The buttons are in intuitive positions, and it seems like they took a lead from the iPhone in design. Buttons can perform multiple functions depending upon the application you're sitting in, and it's super-fast switching from one application to another (thank you intelligent backgrounding).

Overall I'm really happy with the phone and satisfied with the service from Verizon that I've received to-date. So I'm giving my first impressions a 4 out of 5 stars for the HTC Incredible!

* Products and brands are copyrights of their respective companies. Also note - I still have an active iPhone on AT&T service in addition to the new HTC Incredible on Verizon.