The HTC Droid Incredible Review, Clearly Better than the Nexus One

Flash, Why are We Fighting for this Again?

The Apple v. Adobe debate is a great exercise in hypocrisy, but the end solution here isn’t to just enable Flash on all smartphones. The experience is miserable.

HTC ships the Incredible with Flash Lite installed, which will fully load most Flash advertisements. Great for websites, not necessarily great for consumers. Flash Lite does support FLV, but sites like Hulu still don’t work. To make matters worse, the inclusion of Flash Lite appears to make web page loading slower on the Incredible than on the Nexus One.

Connecting via WiFi to a local access point and loading pages with the majority of their content stored locally on my server, I compared the HTC Incredible and Google Nexus One:

In every single test the Incredible took longer to load the pages, despite having the same underlying hardware and a slight edge in Javascript performance (I'll go into greater detail on the tests later in the review). The point is that whatever HTC has done to its browser or its modifications to Android make pages load slower than compared to the Nexus One. Take a smoother UI, pair it with a slower web browser, and you’ve got a recipe for frustration. I will say that although it’s measurably slower than the Nexus One, the Incredible doesn’t feel slow by any means while loading web pages. Instead the browsing experience feels iPhone-speed with a higher resolution display.

Bring the network into play and it’s a totally different story. Now this will vary from one location to the next, but at my office loading pages on the Incredible over Verizon’s 3G was faster than on the Nexus One over AT&T’s 3G.

The Network: Verizon vs. AT&T

Other than my basement, I get great AT&T 3G reception at my house. I’ve never had a Verizon phone at my current house so the HTC Incredible was a nice experiment. While the signal strength indicator on the Incredible was never that good, 3G performance was better on the Incredible than on the AT&T Nexus One.

As I’m writing this paragraph I’m actually in a car on my way up to DC. Whenever I was near a major city I’d get 3G on both AT&T and Verizon, but in between AT&T would kick me down to Edge while I’d usually stay on 3G with Verizon. It’s a horribly unscientific test but it seems that if I were doing a lot of traveling between cities that I’d pick Verizon over AT&T. However around major cities (very large cities excluded, e.g. NYC, SF), AT&T’s 3G does just fine.

I will say that I have been noticing AT&T dropping more of my calls over the past couple of years but it hasn’t been enough for me to want to jump ship just yet