April 19, 2010, 7:37 AM — If you're in the market for a new cellphone and have been considering the Motorola Droid or the Nexus One, you might want to put that decision on hold for a few more weeks. HTC's new Incredible is coming to Verizon Wireless on April 29th as the HTC Droid Incredible ($199 with a two-year contract) and it might be the Android phone to beat, at least for now.
The phone looks great on paper; check out some of the specs:
- Android 2.1
- Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor running at 1 Ghz
- 3.7", 480x800 screen
- 8 GB of internal storage
- MicroSD slot supports up to 16GB card
- 8 megapixel camera (stills and video capture)
- Optical joystick
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It uses HTC's Sense UI which has seven home screens and extras like a Friendstream feature that combines social media feeds (Twitter and Facebook have been mentioned specifically) into one stream of updates. This also links in with your contacts, so you can open a contact's page on the phone and from within it get their recent social media updates. It seems like an interesting way to invert the relationship between people and updates to some extent.
More specs fall under the "rumor" umbrella for now. It's still unclear if the advertised 8 GB of storage is on an included MicroSD card, or if the phone includes 8 GB on the board plus a 16 GB card for a total of 24 GBs of storage. More incredibly (pardon the pun) Android and Me suggests the phone will support (compsite) video out but Verizon doesn't mention this feature, and you'd think they would if it existed. [Update: Composite out, via an add-on accessory, confirmed and demonstrated at Wirefly.]
Until the phone launches and gets into reviewers hands we won't know if the hardware lives up to the hype, but we won't have long to wait (if you're already sold, you can pre-order it now). In the meantime here's a blurry-cam video from the 99% conference that was held in New York last week. You can see how responsive the phone is but the video is too short to really dig into the details.
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