TAG | htc
It’s no surprise that Verizon is no longer going to be supporting the Nexus One now that HTC has released the Droid Incredible. Some speculate that the “Incredible” is only a mildly upgraded Nexus One, but a side-by-side comparison of their specs shows only two dramatic differences. The new device sports 8GB of internal ROM storage (up from 512MB on the Nexus One), and boasts an 8-megapixel camera (the Nexus One has a 5-megapixel camera). The screens share the same dimensions (480×800 at 252 dpi at a 3.7″ diagonal), though the Nexus One appears to be the better-quality AMOLED variety where the “Incredible” only has an OLED screen. However, the bigger camera and larger internal ROM come at a cost: 26% fewer minutes of talk time (312 minutes vs. Nexus One’s 420 minutes), and 42% fewer standby hours (146 hours versus the Nexus One’s 250 hours). The battery life alone may make this a deal breaker for some.
For as quickly as the HTC Incredible came to market, there are already some HTC Incredible Accessories shops popping up online. You may well want to check out some of the Droid Incredible Cases available, or at the very least a Droid Incredible Screen Protector to protect against scratching. I’m always paranoid about scratching the screen of my Nexus, but I do protect the device with a silicon case.
Is the “Incredible” a Nexus One “killer”? Verizon seems to think so, since they’ve pulled their support for the Nexus One at Google’s phone ordering page. Personally, I think it’s a bit arrogant to use an attention-seeking adjective to name the phone. What will be their next phone? The “Stupendous”? The “Ridiculous”? The “Ginormous“?
If I were up for a contract renewal or wanted to change carriers, I would pass on the HTC Droid Incredible. I multitask quite a bit with my Nexus One and already drain the battery every day — I even purchased a second battery for emergency use — so I can’t imagine having significantly less battery life on the new HTC device. That, and given that Verizon’s network is yet incapable of letting you talk on the phone and use the Internet on the device simultaneously, I would wait until their network expansion is complete before considering this phone. However, if you’re locked into Verizon and looking to pick up an Android-based device, the HTC Droid Incredible does have some significant advantages over the Motorola Droid like nearly double the processor speed, an FM radio, and 802.11n wireless.
Disclosure: this blog post was sponsored by talkietech.com, but all opinions are my own.
The folks over at BillShrink started a thread a little while back which they revisited when the Google Nexus One was released in early January 2010, and wrote up a nice comparison chart of the different phones’ capabilities, and costs. While they have tried to keep it up to date, lots of users have left comments on their site about price plans, requesting extra features on the chart, etc.
In a quest last night to find a cheaper alternative to giving AT&T $180 of my hard-earned cash every month for our two cell phones, I decided to take a page from BillShrink, and include some of the other phones that their users were requesting, along with additional phone features.
I’ll add more to the list as I have time, but this was my evening project last night. It’s ugly, it’s not written well, but it gets the point across. I’ll work on the overall look of it if enough people find it useful. Specs were gathered from several sites including the carriers, the phone manufacturers, a site called “pdadb” and a few items from the BillShrink chart.
http://iandouglas.com/cellphones.php
My chart will let you view specs from a single phone in the list, or multiple phones side-by-side so you can see their capabilities. I thought it would be interesting to list screen resolutions and DPI (calculated from the diagonal size), internal vs external storage, USB connector types, and more details about what the minimum/maximum carrier plans would include for the money you’ll pay for the phone over two years of ownership.
