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
General Performance
In a world where dual-core smartphones are all the rage, the Incredible 2 actually performs surprisingly well. Actually using the phone is pretty quick. The UI is smoothly animated and although you can tell that you're not getting anywhere close to 60 fps (think 25 - 30 fps in most cases) the phone never feels slow. That's not to say that it feels fast, it just doesn't feel slow despite running last-year's hardware.
The benchmarks echo my user experience. In fact, our Sunspider results put the Incredible 2 at the top of the charts. Normal run to run variance makes the position of the top 10% of the phones insignificant, but the Incredible 2 runs through this javascript test very quickly.
BrowserMark paints a slightly more realistic picture as the Incredible 2 is fast, but clearly behind the Tegra 2 phones.
Flash performance is identical to other MSM8x55 phones. Only the newer MSM8260 and Tegra 2 based phones can deliver better performance here.
Testing Linpack under Android isn't super useful, it just shows us that single-threaded floating point performance hasn't really improved over the past year. Only the Sensation with its 1.2GHz clock speed gives us a real performance advantage here.
Its the Incredible 2's Adreno 205 GPU that shows its age the most in our performance tests:
Imagination's SGX 540, NVIDIA's Tegra 2 and of course Qualcomm's own Adreno 220 are much better performers here.
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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.