Droid Incredible

Maxmosbey

Maxmosbey

Final Approach
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I need to get serious.
I wasn't sure if I should put this in Technical, or here. I decided I would put it here. Has anybody owned a Droid Incredible, and how is it?
 
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I own one. (Or, more specifically, I bought one from VZ and they allow me to pay them to use it on their network).

It's OK. First software rev had a few bugs, the current rev is fine. No complaints, other than the usual: screen too small, battery life too short, and my fat fingers keep hitting the wrong keys on the virtual keyboard.

It will never work on 4G. Don't know whether it'll do the next rev of Android.

Look at the newer stuff - mine is 8 months old, which is a lifetime.

Fairly happy for what it is.
 
Mines OK...it is a bit buggy but OK...I have no baseline comparison as I tend to wear things completely out before I "upgrade"....
 
I have one for work. It is ok for what it is. I would not own a droid personally.
 
I've had one since they came out back in May '10. That means we're coming up on the 1st birthday, which as someone already pointed out means it's ancient in terms of cell phone lifespan.

Compared to what's come out since its release, though, it still competes very well. The fact that you've been able to get it for "free" in recent months with a two year Verizon contract, compared to ~$200 for comparable phones, makes it still worth looking at, if you're not worried about having the latest-and-greatest.

Definitely a thumb's-up from me.
 
Jim_R said:
I've had one since they came out back in May '10. That means we're coming up on the 1st birthday, which as someone already pointed out means it's ancient in terms of cell phone lifespan.
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The last time I upgraded cell phones, the salesman called his friends over to look at the old one I had been using.

Gonna have to bite the bullet eventually. Would like to get a smart phone, but am a bit curious about what the best data plan arrangement would be. I can't have a cell phone at work, and at home I have all the high-speed internet I'd need using my desktop or laptop. Obviously, getting a "full-up" plan doesn't make sense. Any suggestions?

Ron Wanttaja
 
I don't think you can get a smart phone without a data plan. I have a droid2 wife has an incredible, both work fine. Smart phones are great but I don't geek-out about the little details. As for using one, once you get it, you'll probably really like it.
 
ClimbnSink said:
I don't think you can get a smart phone without a data plan. I have a droid2 wife has an incredible, both work fine. Smart phones are great but I don't geek-out about the little details. As for using one, once you get it, you'll probably really like it.
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You will have to get a data plan. I think I'm paying $30 a month for the data plan, maybe less with a corp. discount. I'm on a relatively low minutes plan, but it meets my needs.

Here's how I'd compare BB to Incredible: BB is a great email machine, and OK at web-browse and attachments. Incredible is a good web browse machine & attachments, OK at email.
 
wsuffa said:
Incredible is a good web browse machine & attachments, OK at email.
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I've never used a BB, but I consider email one of the strengths of the Incredible, especially for personal email. I transitioned my personal email to Gmail, and use Outlook on my home PC. Whether I use that home PC with Outlook, my phone, or a random PC to get to Gmail via the web, I have identical access to my mail and contacts. It's slick and seamless...can't imagine it any better.

For work email (MS Exchange-based), the phone buzzes a few sec after Outlook on the work PC dings, so it's easy to keep up-to-speed. I don't have access to the global address book I have at work, so if I don't have a colleague's work email address already in my contacts or a message from them that I can just reply to, then that's a problem. For me, though, it's rare that I run into that situation (and as a last resort, I can use the phone's browser to access the webmail interface for the office, which *does* have access to the global address book, so I'm still not dead-in-the-water).
 
I really like my Incredible, so much so that I'm not sure whether or not I'll go for the iPhone when I'm up for renewal or another HTC Droid.

There are three downsides I'll mention. The first is that the built-in camera is really good for pictures, but only really so-so for video.

Second, the microphone isn't really all that great when used for video or audio recording. However, it works well for phone calls since high quality and a high dynamic range aren't important for that application. I used to be able to record concerts pretty well on my Blackberry, and that just isn't an option with this phone.

Third, the battery life is horrendous. With any kind of moderate to heavy use it was questionable whether or not you'd make it the day. The batter in the phone is just way under-sized for it's performance potential. I managed to solve that problem by buying a larger battery for $20 from HTC Express. You can also get an external battery charger from the same place that will let you keep both batteries charged, but I really have to try to drain it before a day is up.

tl;dr -- I really like my Incredible despite a few flaws, and it will be an interesting decision between a Droid and an iPhone when I'm next eligible for an upgrade.
 
Thanks for all the responses. I really appreciate it. One of the things I'm worried about is battery life. I hear horror stories about people not even getting a day out of their battery. I can't imagine that I will be running a lot of apps all day long, so I wonder if it will even be an issue. I have no problem with charging it every night. I am going from an old flip phone to a smart phone. The sales person at Verizon was pushing the Incredible. I liked it in the store. The data plan is thirty bucks a month. I don't really need a smart phone, but I always have this fear of being left behind by technology. Everybody and their brother seems to have a smart phone these days. Strange thing to be afraid of.
 
bluesky74656 said:
I really like my Incredible, so much so that I'm not sure whether or not I'll go for the iPhone when I'm up for renewal or another HTC Droid.

There are three downsides I'll mention. The first is that the built-in camera is really good for pictures, but only really so-so for video.

Second, the microphone isn't really all that great when used for video or audio recording. However, it works well for phone calls since high quality and a high dynamic range aren't important for that application. I used to be able to record concerts pretty well on my Blackberry, and that just isn't an option with this phone.

Third, the battery life is horrendous. With any kind of moderate to heavy use it was questionable whether or not you'd make it the day. The batter in the phone is just way under-sized for it's performance potential. I managed to solve that problem by buying a larger battery for $20 from HTC Express. You can also get an external battery charger from the same place that will let you keep both batteries charged, but I really have to try to drain it before a day is up.

tl;dr -- I really like my Incredible despite a few flaws, and it will be an interesting decision between a Droid and an iPhone when I'm next eligible for an upgrade.
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Someone else said that they got a larger battery for their incredible. What size did you get? I know that the one that comes with it is 1300mAh. With going up in power, at some point, you have to get a different back plate to cover the battery. I don't want to do that. I know that a lot of people like their BB, but they just didn't talk to me when I messed with them. The incredible did.
 
I got this one. It's a little bit strange-- it's labelled as an 1800mAh battery, but if you do the math based on the info on the battery it only comes out to 1500mAh. I also own a Seido 1750mAh battery. Anecdotally, I think I get better performance out of the 1800/1500mAh battery.

About a week ago I went on a trip that involved driving around all day using my phone as a GPS, which is rather power intensive. During that day, both batteries lasted about 7 hours. But I was being absolutely brutal on them. I can't imagine many other circumstances that would lead to either of these batteries lasting less than a day.

Edit--- Neither of my larger batteries require a new backing plate.
 
bluesky74656 said:
I got this one. It's a little bit strange-- it's labelled as an 1800mAh battery, but if you do the math based on the info on the battery it only comes out to 1500mAh. I also own a Seido 1750mAh battery. Anecdotally, I think I get better performance out of the 1800/1500mAh battery.

About a week ago I went on a trip that involved driving around all day using my phone as a GPS, which is rather power intensive. During that day, both batteries lasted about 7 hours. But I was being absolutely brutal on them. I can't imagine many other circumstances that would lead to either of these batteries lasting less than a day.

Edit--- Neither of my larger batteries require a new backing plate.
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Thanks, that is the kind of info I'm looking for.:thumbsup:
 
Maxmosbey said:
Thanks for all the responses. I really appreciate it. One of the things I'm worried about is battery life. I hear horror stories about people not even getting a day out of their battery. I can't imagine that I will be running a lot of apps all day long, so I wonder if it will even be an issue. I have no problem with charging it every night. I am going from an old flip phone to a smart phone. The sales person at Verizon was pushing the Incredible. I liked it in the store. The data plan is thirty bucks a month. I don't really need a smart phone, but I always have this fear of being left behind by technology. Everybody and their brother seems to have a smart phone these days. Strange thing to be afraid of.
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Ah, OK, battery life.

To some degree it depends on whether it's on wifi or 3G. I get better life on wifi (around the house) than 3G. But that's expected given the higher power demand on 3G.

My experience: the current software version will usually give me a full day's worth of "typical" use. Heavy use - especially using the GPS with Google maps (which accesses both the GPS AND 3G) for a while, then typical use will take it down to 7-8 hours (in the old software version, I used >50% of the battery in a 30 minute car trip using GPS & 3G.... it's significantly better now). I've used the battery in 6-7 hours with heavy use, mostly browsing.

Light use will give you 12-16 hours (I took mine off charger at 7 AM today, it's currently at 85% @ 11AM - but I'm typing this post on a laptop computer). Just looked at the battery use since Thursday night: cell standby has chewed 30% of the battery life, wifi has chewed 27%, and Phone Idle has chewed 29%. The android system itself has only used 9% of battery use.

The unit can get hot during heavy use.

These days, I use a car charger if I'm going to be out and about with the GPS running. The display itself uses a fair amount of battery power.
 
wsuffa said:
Ah, OK, battery life.

To some degree it depends on whether it's on wifi or 3G. I get better life on wifi (around the house) than 3G. But that's expected given the higher power demand on 3G.

My experience: the current software version will usually give me a full day's worth of "typical" use. Heavy use - especially using the GPS with Google maps (which accesses both the GPS AND 3G) for a while, then typical use will take it down to 7-8 hours (in the old software version, I used >50% of the battery in a 30 minute car trip using GPS & 3G.... it's significantly better now). I've used the battery in 6-7 hours with heavy use, mostly browsing.

Light use will give you 12-16 hours (I took mine off charger at 7 AM today, it's currently at 85% @ 11AM - but I'm typing this post on a laptop computer). Just looked at the battery use since Thursday night: cell standby has chewed 30% of the battery life, wifi has chewed 27%, and Phone Idle has chewed 29%. The android system itself has only used 9% of battery use.

The unit can get hot during heavy use.

These days, I use a car charger if I'm going to be out and about with the GPS running. The display itself uses a fair amount of battery power.
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So if I buy it, and generally speaking, in the course of a day, I use it for a phone, send a text message or two, check the weather a couple of times, get on the internet and check my yahoo e-mai, and see what you guys are talking about four or five times, what kind of battery life do you think I will get? You say that wifi used 27%. Do you have it on wifi a lot? Why? Can you just turn it off and on, thereby saving power drain? In other words, do you have to be connected to the internet all of the time? Does not being connected all the time defeat the purpose of a smart phone. I have a Garmin GPS in my truck. Will I use the GPS feature in the phone instead of the Garmin? What is app killer? Do you have it? Does it help anything? The display uses a lot of power. Doesn't the display turn off when you aren't using it? I'm full of questions today. Thanks so much for answering them.
 
Generally if WiFi is available then using it for data uses less battery than 3G. However, if WiFi is not available, then your phone will waste battery power searching for new networks. So I generally use WiFi at home and at work, and leave it switched off everywhere else.

With regard to app killers, they are programs that automatically kill off programs that you're not using. On the surface this sounds like a good idea, and can be in limited circumstances, but in general the Android OS is designed to let programs sleep without using many resources, and quietly end them if you don't re-open them for a while. More info on this available here.

I have a GPS built into my car as well. There are two situations where I would use my phone over that. 1.) The car's address info is on a DVD, whereas the phone uses Google Maps, so if it's a new address then Google might be more accurate. 2.) If someone sends me an email or text with an address, then I can just click on the address and have it open in Google Maps, which is easier than entering the address into my car.

The display does automatically dim. I leave it on automatic and it generally doesn't eat very much power at all.
 
I think you will be fine with the battery life. When you first get it and run the screen/browser and GPS full on for a few hours the battery goes and think it is a problem. Real world you should easily get all day for what you want. Turning off GPS saves a lot of battery life, instead of turning it off use airplane mode(no signals, calendar etc and non connected apps/games still work.)
 
You should be OK with battery life. WiFi consumption is high because I keep it active (via wifi) in the house. WiFi consumes less energy than the 3G connection.

You CAN turn off both wifi and 3G independently. If you turn off 3G you also lose cellphone capability. Phone idle chews up much of the battery life. If you live in an area without 3G service, and are stuck with 1xRTT, I'd expect battery consumption to be a bit higher.

The phone also uses wifi signals to do position location in areas where you can't see the GPS constellation. So I do leave it on most of the time.

As I noted, there have only been a couple of occasions where I drained the battery before end of day. I'd assume with the profile you laid out that yours should last most of the day.
 
Thanks again for all the advice. I have a couple of weeks before I am eligible to upgrade. I'm pretty sure that I will go with the Incredible. Talking to you guys helped me a lot. I might invest in a the other battery though. For the price, it might be a good move. I'm sure that I will be getting back to you once I have it in hand. :thumbsup:
 
Ah, yes; I neglected to mention the battery in my earlier posts. With moderate use, I had no trouble getting through a day with the stock battery, but heavy use (like running Google MyTracks in the plane) would drain it by late afternoon.

I first bought the Verizon extended battery (2150mAh vs. stock batt's 1300 mAh). This would easily get me through a day of heavy use, or two days of more normal use. (At the time, I picked it up on special for about $25.)

Later, I decided I wanted even more reserve, so I bought the Seido extended battery (3500 mAh), which can be found online for ~$50. This one gets me through 1.5 - 2 days of heavy use, or 3 -4 days of more normal use. (I can easily take it for a weekend trip and not have to worry about recharging.)

I still have the original battery. If all three were fully charged, I could get through a week without recharging, without having to worry about how much I was using the phone.

That may be overkill, but it's nice to have options.
 
I guess here's as good a place as any for this question, which may seem stupid to some of you.

I may be changing firms, and my new firm doesn't support Blackberry. So, I am looking at either a VZ iPhone or a Droid. Question: does the iPhone sinc up with Microsoft Outlook?

I live by my Outlook. The still-in-college Google Geek I spoke to at the Verizon store today told me it's not a big deal for the Droid - download Outlook contacts into a Gmail account and you have your contacts. Blah, blah, blah. Seems like a PITA to me. I just want to see my Outlook calendar, contacts, and tasks on my phone and be done with it.

So, does that work with an iPhone, or do I have to go through similar exercises to the Droid to make this Outlook thing work?
 
nddons said:
I guess here's as good a place as any for this question, which may seem stupid to some of you.

I may be changing firms, and my new firm doesn't support Blackberry. So, I am looking at either a VZ iPhone or a Droid. Question: does the iPhone sinc up with Microsoft Outlook?

I live by my Outlook. The still-in-college Google Geek I spoke to at the Verizon store today told me it's not a big deal for the Droid - download Outlook contacts into a Gmail account and you have your contacts. Blah, blah, blah. Seems like a PITA to me. I just want to see my Outlook calendar, contacts, and tasks on my phone and be done with it.

So, does that work with an iPhone, or do I have to go through similar exercises to the Droid to make this Outlook thing work?
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First off...are you talking about Outlook mail, or Outlook as a client for Exchange?

If exchange, then Droid will connect nicely to it via ActiveSync...it'll show up as a separate corporate e-mail client (not GMail). Your contacts will sync, so will your calendar...complete non-event.

If it's native outlook, I've not a clue...I would never use Outlook if it weren't for an Exchange back-end.
 
^^^^^ 100% correct in my experience as well.
 
I have my standalone outlook syncing with the Droid, using my G-Mail account as a conduit and CompanionLink for google. Works very very well for my contacts and calendar.
 
I sync my iPhone with Outlook. On the iPhone info page in iTunes there's a drop-down menu. You can choose to sync with Outlook, Google Contacts, Windows Contacts or Yahoo! Address book.
 
Let me share with you today's experience with the incredible...this is more operator error but something to pay attention to if you're not well versed in mobile devices (that would be me)...

The phone is used for work and connects to email via exchange active sync. Well, woke up this morning and all was working as designed. Once I was at my clients business I kept receiving an error that the phone was unable to connect to server. Hmmm, interesting. Since I had a forced password change on Monday I decided to confirm it was accurate (not sure why it would not be but what the heck). All good there but problem persists. Cycled phone on/off. No joy. Swallow my pride and call the help desk for advise. After checking all the usual suspects and all working, the agent asked if I had good service. I told him full bars. He asked if it said 3g. Hmm, no, it shows a wireless connection. Went to the wireless area and found it was "connected" to a linksys wireless but that wireless was not allowing access to the internet. Long story short, cut off the wireless feature and went back to cell service to resolve the problem. That was about a 45 minute lesson.
 
pilot_dude said:
Let me share with you today's experience with the incredible...this is more operator error but something to pay attention to if you're not well versed in mobile devices (that would be me)...

The phone is used for work and connects to email via exchange active sync. Well, woke up this morning and all was working as designed. Once I was at my clients business I kept receiving an error that the phone was unable to connect to server. Hmmm, interesting. Since I had a forced password change on Monday I decided to confirm it was accurate (not sure why it would not be but what the heck). All good there but problem persists. Cycled phone on/off. No joy. Swallow my pride and call the help desk for advise. After checking all the usual suspects and all working, the agent asked if I had good service. I told him full bars. He asked if it said 3g. Hmm, no, it shows a wireless connection. Went to the wireless area and found it was "connected" to a linksys wireless but that wireless was not allowing access to the internet. Long story short, cut off the wireless feature and went back to cell service to resolve the problem. That was about a 45 minute lesson.
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That could also probably happen if you need to click through an "I Agree" screen before the router, even if it's "open", lets you on the internet. Good tip. Thanks!
 
pilot_dude said:
Let me share with you today's experience with the incredible...this is more operator error but something to pay attention to if you're not well versed in mobile devices (that would be me)...

The phone is used for work and connects to email via exchange active sync. Well, woke up this morning and all was working as designed. Once I was at my clients business I kept receiving an error that the phone was unable to connect to server. Hmmm, interesting. Since I had a forced password change on Monday I decided to confirm it was accurate (not sure why it would not be but what the heck). All good there but problem persists. Cycled phone on/off. No joy. Swallow my pride and call the help desk for advise. After checking all the usual suspects and all working, the agent asked if I had good service. I told him full bars. He asked if it said 3g. Hmm, no, it shows a wireless connection. Went to the wireless area and found it was "connected" to a linksys wireless but that wireless was not allowing access to the internet. Long story short, cut off the wireless feature and went back to cell service to resolve the problem. That was about a 45 minute lesson.
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What is the benefit of being on a wifi network vs being on cell service for the internet?

I went to the Verizon store to play with a dinc the other day. Dinc, I'm working on the lingo.:D A young lady who worked there came over and got me to look at the Vortex by LG. I kind of liked it in the store, but I did some research at home here and decided that the incredible is a lot better choice. I am wondering about the Thunderbolt, which is supposed to come out in a week or two. I'm not sure though that I need to get 4g. The young lady at the Verizon store told me that 90% of the nation would be 4g by the end of 2012. Well, we will see, and I'll be pretty close to upgrading again by the end of 2012. Four more weeks until I can upgrade. I'm getting kind of excited about this.
 
Maxmosbey said:
What is the benefit of being on a wifi network vs being on cell service for the internet?
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Generally, two reasons: (1) Wi-fi is typically a faster data connection than 3G, though in practice you won't likely notice or care unless you're downloading megs and megs of data. (2) If you're on a metered data plan (i.e., "pay by the megabyte"), then you'll appreciate getting "free data" from a local wi-fi connection rather than running up the meter on your cell plan.

Verizon's data plans are all "unlimited" today, but in the very near future that's going away and being replaced by "tiered" plans, where you pay a flat rate for x, y, or z MB of data per month, and then get charged add'l for any overages. It's expected that all providers will be moving away from "unlimited" data plans in favor of such "tiered" plans in the very near future.
 
I upgraded to the incredible on Friday. The incredible is being phased out. Why, I don't know. Neither does the girl at the Verizon store, except to say that they are bringing out phones so fast that they phase the older ones out pretty quickly. So I went Verizon Store and they were out of them. They also said that they would not be getting any in. I looked at several others and did not like them near as much as the incredible. As far as 4G, I don't think that 4G is going to mean anything to me for a while. Keep in mind that I have been going in there once a week to play with the incredible for the last three months. So after looking at other phones for a while I left without one. Then I went up to the mall, as they have a Verizon retailer there, Spring Valley wireless. I lucked out, they had plenty of them in stock. Not to mention that the guy there was really positive about the incredible, and uses one himself. I bought it there on Friday afternoon. The sales guy helped me set some basic functions up on it before I took it home.

I didn't do much with it Friday. I went out for drinks with my wife and some friends after they got off work, then came home, played around with it for a few minutes, had my wife call me a couple of times, then put it on the charger. Saturday morning it was fully charged. I messed with it a full three hours Saturday morning and then off and on all afternoon and evening. In fact, I probably spent most of the evening on it. I figured out how to make an android friendly yahoo show up on it. Yahoo has an e-mail app that works really great on my phone, so I set that all up. I messed with my yahoo calendar and finally decided that the google calender was probably going to work better for me, and it would be easier to set up on the phone. Besides, my wife has been after me to go to the google calendar for over a year. I tried to sync the two calenders and that didn't work very well. I ended up just manually entering everything on the google calender. About nine-thirty the battery on the phone was getting low. However, I had been on a lot more than I imagined that I would generally be on it in a day. Sunday rolled around. I was on it off and on while we went out for coffee Sunday morning. I left the phone at home while I went to church and out for lunch. In the afternoon I was on it quite a bit. I fine tuned everything, took some pictures and posted them on my Facebook, and just generally dicked around with it. By the time I went to bed, it still had half a charge on the battery.

All in all, I really like this phone. I have it pretty much set up how I want it. I was worried about the battery life, as a lot of people were reporting that it was short, but if Sunday is any indication I should easily get through a day with it, maybe two if I was forced to. I have no problems plugging it in every night anyway when I go to bed. My wife plugs her's in every night. The guy at the store warned me that the battery did not reach full potential until after it had been cycled ten or so times, so it can only get better. So far so good. I'm pretty happy with it.
 
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If you need a phone that will work overseas, keep looking. The Droid2 is global ready. The others arent. Why Verizon doesn't go all tri band still escapes me.
 
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