HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Review: One Alternative
by Jason Inofuentes on July 13, 2012 9:24 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Droid
- Mobile
Call Quality and Speakerphone
A phone is still a phone, even if it’s a smartphone. So how does the Incredible 4G do in that regard? Voice quality was clear and plenty loud enough. I wouldn’t say it was pin drop quality, but I could make out voices on the other line without difficulty. Some speakerphones are designed to work well on phones screen down or up, not this one, though. The speaker grill is on the large hump on the back, near the camera sensor. This means that when left screen up the speaker is somewhat muffled, flip it over, though, and all’s better. I’ve yet to pick up all the fancy testing gear our elves are hard at work building so I don’t have empiric data on loudness, but I can say it was enough that I forewent my laptop as an audio source while working in the kitchen. And then there’s that Beats logo on the back. As Brian mentioned in the One X review, the patented Beats technology now works on non-Beats headphones, so my favorite cheap-o earbuds sounded much more bassy than I’d expected. So I shut Beats off. NPR and piano rock just doesn’t sound great with more bass.
GPS Performance
GPS performance on all the One devices has been great, owing in no small part to the GNSS silicon inside the Snapdragon S4. Satellite acquisitions are speedy inside and out, and with Qualcomm’s excellent cellular-based location awareness, navigation instructions are almost instant, so long as there’s a good data connection.
Cellular Performance
Speaking of that data connection . . . Coverage maps aren’t necessarily infallible. There are several factors that might not be taken into account when they’re drawn, and unfortunately that means a dark maroon color might not mean much in terms of actual reception. And that’s just the topographic factors. Interiors are complicated for radio propagation, and even five bars of signal can mean very little in actual terms. I recently moved from almost beneath a tower full of cellular transmitters, to almost perfectly positioned between several towers so as to get coverage from none of them. Unfortunately this is an issue yet to be resolved, and so my battery and cellular testing remains somewhat incomplete. I’ve seen LTE speeds from the Incredible 4G that mirror those we’ve seen from other similar devices. And I’ve seen speeds I’d expect to see from more 3G devices. There’s a reality that when we choose a place to do our tests, we may end up choosing a bad place. We'll continue testing to see how it behaves in better settings, but for now, we'll present the data we have.
The data isn't as clear as we usually present, and there's obvious flashes of brilliance in our LTE speeds. But this could be as much a result of signal or network issues as it could be a result of issues with this phone. Latency is much more consistent than download speeds, so the towers we were accessing may have just been heavily loaded. AT&T's LTE network is not nearly so heavily loaded as VZW's, but performance between the two should be theoretically equal. As AT&T's network becomes more taxed, it will likely suffer similar degradation in speed.
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lunarx3dfx - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
It will be interesting to see what happens with the new iPhone, but just like Mac vs. Windows, Google and Microsoft can only do so much to optimize for devices considering how varied they all are. Throw in some LTE radios and things get even more interesting. On that point though, I have a Galaxy Nexus and a Focus Flash, and I was completely impressed by the battery life Microsoft was able to squeeze out of Windows Phone. Of course, they restrict what SoC's manufacturers are allowed to use.As far as Android is concerned, I don't know which phone you have, but my Galaxy Nexus running the stock rom but rooted outlasts my girlfriends iPhone 4S in battery life. With Android devices, it has been my experience that battery life truly varies device to device.
As far as UI responsiveness, Google started to fix that with ICS and have made it almost perfect if not perfect on Jellybean. However, you can't really blame them yet again for how laggy Android has been in the past considering the fact that hardware acceleration for the UI was pretty much not an option until ICS was released. Anything running ICS or higher has to be designed to a standard, meaning a GPU that can handle hardware acceleration.
Microsoft and Google have a much more difficult task than Apple when it comes to designing, maintaining, and improving their mobile OSes because of how varied the hardware is. They don't have the option to optimize to the extent that Apple does. Considering that I think they have both done a fantastic job so far, and it is only getting better.
sssbbb - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
What's 3G?legoman666 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
How is that a $150 phone + 2 year contract is considered budget whereas a $200 phone + contract is not? The difference after 2 years is a whole $50 out of approximately $2300.Please stop ignoring the cost of contracts in your consideration.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Doesn't he say clearly enough that the difference is just 50$, and this is not very much - from where ever you look at it. And that difference remains, whatever else you're spending on the phone, contract etc.tbutler - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Except that the contract cost is going to be the same no matter which phone you choose. So by reductio ad absurdum, phone cost should never matter, because it will always be a small fraction of the contract cost.... right?But, y'know, people do care about these things for some strange reason.
bill4 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
With these absolute garbage Motorola and HTC droid phones-usually incredibly overpriced too boot-, being their "flagships".I mean this thing is pathetic by todays standards, 960X540? I'm not surprised it's overpriced too, Verizon phones always are. I'm actually shocked they only charge 199 for the GS3 instead of 299 like they usually charge for top phones, but I think they just didnt want to look horrible compared to the other carriers on that one, if they could have gotten away with it they probably would have priced the GS3 at 399 on contract.
I still remember when Verizon had the "HTC Thunderbolt" and everybody thought it was so awesome, ATT got the same phone a little later called the inspire for $100 less and nobody cared, because ATT customers dont have nothing but garbage to choose from on a regular basis.. I think Verizon customers rival Apple for their love of being overcharged.
Verizon is absolutely awful.
danjw - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
So Verizon made HTC nerf their version of the HTC One XL? Most of the benchmarks seem to come in worse then her counter parts on AT&T and Sprint. Epic fail Verizon!chrnochime - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
I'd be happy with a 4" screen phone instead of something even larger. I don't use the phone to play games and nurture my fb page every 10 minutes like a lot of people do or even browse that often, so anything larger is just too bulky to carry around.Looks like I'd end up with an iphone, if there's nothing that's not huge running android in a few months...
geniekid - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Too bad about the battery life. I really want a 4 to 4.3" phone, but form is secondary to battery life for me. As it stands, I'll probably give up one-handed usability for battery life by getting the SGS3.amdwilliam1985 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
One-handed usability with SGS3 is very possible. Don't get fool by the Apple cool-aids about 3.5" one-handed and >3.5" 2-handed.I'm surprise to see a lot of girls in the NYC subway using SGS3 with 1 hand, if they can do it you can too. It just takes some time to get use to it. But once you got used to it, you can't look at or type on a puny 3.5" anymore. Trust me, I went from 3.5"(iPhone 3gs) to 4.5"(TMobile SGS2) and I can't go back anymore.