Great phone, iPhone 4g competitor but battery life is horrible

I had been looking to get a new smart phone for the last 4 months and heard about the future release of the incredible so I waited until it arrived at Verizon and I then took the plunge. The phones features are everything that was anticipated and then some.

THE GOOD STUFF:

I love the voice recognition, you can search for contacts, enter text for sms messages and email, and search for items on the web by pressing a single button and then talking into the microphone. The phone listens to your voice audio and converts it into text. The voice recognition is surprisingly accurate and I use this all the time (great time saver).

The phone is infinitely customizable and allows you to tweak and change all sorts of settings. To a "techy" person this is great but this could be a bit of an nuisance to a less savvy user because there are a significant amount of menus and sub-menus to navigate through to find all the settings.

Screen resolution is absolutely amazing (900x480) and even though it is slightly lower resolution than the new iphone 4g (which is 960x640) the incredible screen size is a bit larger which is more useful in my opinion. Touch sensitivity is great, no problems entering text with the on screen keyboard.

The 8 megapixel camera and 800x480 video capture work great too. the new iPhone will trump the video resolution of the incredible with a 720p capture at 30 frames per second, but the incredible camera will surpass the new iPhone by 3 megapixels.

Pop email and gmail setup is a snap.. really easy. Love how the phone synchronizes with all of my google stuff like contacts, calendar etc. This is something that the iPhone wont have but the iPhone will offer an alternative via Apple's MobileMe service.

The browser works great. Easy to use, intuitive and allows you to open multiple browser windows as well. Zooming in and out is easy with the pinch gestures.


THE BAD:

HTC really screwed up with putting a 1300mah battery in this phone as it is far too small causing absolutely horrible battery life. Even when one turns off power hungry services like GPS, wifi, mobile data connection etc the battery life is pathetic. Getting through 8 to 10 hours is a challenge even with minimal web surfing, texting and email checking. The addition of another .1 or .2 inches of thickness (hardly noticable) would have allowed for a larger battery and acceptable battery life. This issue alone is probably going to cause me to return the phone as there is no point in turning off all the bells and whistles that you paid good money for, and even then the battery life is unacceptable.

Another issue is the signal strength. The signal strength reported on the meter is almost always at 1 bar when all other phones (even on the same Verizon network) report two or three more bars. Not sure if this is just a stingy display issue or if this is a real issue. My calls don't seem to get dropped due to this, but if the phone thinks the signal is low it's going to use up more juice cranking up the data connection to compensate for the perceived signal strength.

The phone also gets warm when in use. This shows that the phone is really gobbling up battery power (batteries get warm when being drawn from).

Love the phone, love the functionality but HTC really missed some cell phone 101 design concepts with the pathetic battery life and signal strength issues.

Will probably ditch the phone (i'm still in the 30 day grace period) and get the new iPhone as it is going to have a battery that is reported to be increased by 20+ % over prior iPhones.