HTC Droid Incredible 2 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 3, 2011 11:44 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Verizon
- Droid Incredible 2
- Mobile
Network & WiFi Performance
The Incredible 2 comes with single stream 72Mbps 802.11n support. In our standard test however the best we ever saw was 16Mbps to the phone over WiFi (5 feet away from the AP):
The Incredible 2 uses the same BCM4329 WiFi radio as the Sensation despite posting much lower performance.
I've never characterized Verizon's network performance in Raleigh before but it's generally pretty similar to other EVDO charts we've shown in the past:
There's a lot of clustering around 0.5 - 0.8Mbps and then again around 1.2 - 1.3Mbps. I rarely saw speeds of 2Mbps around town, my experience with the Incredible 2 (and other Verizon phones) in Raleigh had downstream performance around 0.9Mbps.
Upstream performance varies a lot more. Often times I'd see great consistency with downstream speeds only to have completely unpredictable upstream performance. I don't believe this is an issue with the Incredible 2, just how Verizon behaves in Raleigh, NC.
Signal attentuation due to normal use isn't a problem with the Incredible 2. Like all other smartphones you do attenuate the cellular signal by just holding the phone but the drop is similar to other modern phones and obviously not as bad as the AT&T iPhone 4.
| Signal Attenuation Comparison in dB - Lower is Better | ||||||||
| Cupping Tightly | Holding Naturally | Holding in Case | On an Open Palm | |||||
| HTC Droid Incredible 2 | 14.0 | 12.0 | - | 0.0 | ||||
| HTC Sensation | 15.0 | 10.0 | 8.0 | 0.0 | ||||
| Samsung Droid Charge | 10.0 | 10.0 | 5.0 | 0.0 | ||||
| HTC Thunderbolt - LTE | 5.3 | 2.5 | - | 4.4 | ||||
| HTC THunderbolt - EVDO | 6.5 | 0.8 | - | 7.2 | ||||
| Verizon iPhone 4 | 16.5 | 15.5 | 9.0 | 7.9 | ||||
| LG Optimus 2X | 13.7 | 9.3 | - | 5.9 | ||||
| Nexus S | 13.3 | 6.1 | - | 4.3 | ||||
| Droid 2 | 11.5 | 5.1 | - | 4.5 | ||||
| BlackBerry Torch | 15.9 | 7.1 | - | 3.7 | ||||
| Dell Streak | 14.0 | 8.7 | - | 4.0 | ||||
| Droid X | 15.0 | 5.1 | - | 4.5 | ||||
| AT&T iPhone 4 | 24.6 | 19.8 | 7.2 | 9.2 | ||||
| iPhone 3GS | 14.3 | 1.9 | 3.2 | 0.2 | ||||
| HTC Nexus One | 17.7 | 10.7 | 7.7 | 6.7 | ||||
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
Chaser - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - link
After owning a 3G, Droid, EVO, Galaxy, and G2X the Sensation is the sweetest spot ever for a phone and I'll tell you why:LTE (and Wimax for that matter) is for practical purposes more a battery killer than a monumental feature Verizon and Sprint would like you to believe. Unless you are connected charging using LTE as a hotspot you will use LTE very sparingly while the phone is in your pocket. Who really needs 15mbps on a 4inch display? The point being T-Mobile's "4G" at 4-6mbps is more than fast enough even for occasional tethering like at an airport. But the Sensation's battery life is absolutely superb compared to LTE and Wimax. I can leave 4G on all day without a consideration.
I wont write a new review on the Sensation. But with this phone, it's specs, battery and T-Mobile's very competitive everything plan, world phone capability, and simultaneous voice/data (GSM folks) T-Mobile knocked this out of the park. Now that's Incredible.
Penti - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - link
It's already running Gingerbread Android 2.3 here in Sweden. Too bad about Verizon's model. Not a phone that fits in with HTC though.peldor - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - link
At $199 or $149 this phone doesn't stand out at all. On the other hand, Costco has it for $80 as an upgrade or $50 for new Verizon customers.mikehawk51 - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - link
Cmon, enough with this dual core nonsense. Get some apples/apples comparisons here and show me the difference. None of these benchmark scores, I mean actual user experience. Here's one;I own both an HTC Sensation 4G (dual core @ 1.2 ghz) and a HTC Thunderbolt (single core @ 1ghz)
Guess which one performs better in real world use? THE THUNDERBOLT. The overhead of Gingerbread+Sense3 actually taxes the system to the point where homescreen framerates are actually worse than my thunderbolt. I can flick through pages on my thunderbolt as smoothely as an iphone, however on my Senseation there is a noticeable drop in framerate. It doesnt hinder use at all, but I notice it nonetheless, and it bugs the hell out of me. I feel like I have a substandard piece of hardware which cant keep up with the big boys, even though it is technically superior.
Guys, we're talking CELLPHONES here. The PC industry still hasnt caught up with multi-threading yet, but at least they have the reason to try. Threading out GPU rendering and physics pipelines at the same time can yield better performance in theory. But exactly what are we going to be threading on a platform which consists of side scrolling games no greater than mario bros? Or ultra pixelated low poly 3d golfing sims, or 1st person shooters on rails? Even if you could squeeze a quad core xeon into a cellphone with 16GB of ram, the platform just doesnt offer a venue for using this kind of horsepower. People dont want to play Crysis on their cellphones, they want to play Soduku and Penguins.
Dual core processors were developed for phones just because they could, not because there was any need or even demand for it. Dont knock a phone due to white paper specs, especially when older phones may in fact perform better.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - link
check the comparisons on androidcentral between the Sensation and the Evo3D. Apparently there is a software update coming to help the Sensation as something causes the lag that they fixed in the Evo3Dnitink - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
this phone have a great potential unleach its power get full hd games with sd card data..at:http://nitin-xyz.blogspot.com/2011/07/free-and-ful...
jjizzle - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
I'm running android 2.3.4 with sense 3.5 on the original incredible I'm pretty sure the S can manage just fine. The phone to get right now for HTC would probably be the rezound. That is my favorite.