In a couple days, I’ll return home to LA from a 4 day Seattle work-week and waiting for me at home will be a brand new HTC Droid Incredible. There are two main reasons why I finally decided to give up my featureless, but reliable Blackberry for this particular smartphone:
- Verizon. I have been a Verizon customer for over 10 years, barring one brief 6-month stint with Cingular (now AT&T) who appalled me so with their terrible coverage and heinous customer service that I actually threatened to sue them (with cause) if they didn’t let me out of my contract after a mere 6 months…at which point I went back to Verizon, who has really never disappointed me with their network coverage, and rarely disappoints with their customer service.
- Flash. Being a developer, I develop in all sorts of languages…and lately not so much in Flash. However, I do have a soft spot for the technology, as it is a somewhat more “creative” medium for a programmer, whereas Java, PHP etc…are much more “engineering” based languages. As of right now, Android 2.1 comes out of the box with Flash Lite (which is certainly not ideal), but rumor has it that an upgrade to the OS in the not-too-distant future will offer the full Flash 10.1 player. To my sensibilities, this gives the Incredible a HUGE edge over the iPhone because it shows that, even if a technology (Flash) is not optimized for a mobile platform, Google (Android) is willing to work hand in hand with the software developer (Adobe) to make it so, where as the Apple approach is basically: “too bad, we never liked you anyway”.
That being said, there are some other upsides to the Incredible as well, a few of which are:
- Text and email dictation, which supposedly is quite accurate…now I can “text” in the car without breaking California’s “hands-free” law!
- 8 megapixel camera…HUGE boost over the iPhone’s 3 megapixels…now I don’t actually HAVE to bring a camera on vacation with me…I already have a pretty darn good one…built into my phone.
- A 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED capacitive touchscreen LCD…which I believe is on par with the iPhone, but practically all reviews are saying that the HTC’s display blows the iPhone’s out of the water…I’m going to have to run some comparisons of my own before jumping to any conclusions.
- Last but not least…for all you nit-pickers out there, the HTC is 0.01 inches thinner than the iPhone…ok, not such a big deal, or at least I don’t think so. Still, these days (at least as far as a smartphone goes) thinner is better, especially when the other leading Verizon smartphone is the chunky-looking Motorola Droid.
So all that is to say that I’m pretty stoked about this phone. After a lot of thought I decided to wait for this one as opposed to settling for less, and I’m hoping that it ends up being as great as all the reviews are saying it will be.