By John Dodge
I’ve been screaming about Verizon getting the iPhone, but HTC’s Droid Incredible smartphone is shutting me up.
I’ve been playing with one since late last week and love it. OK, the iPhone has apps numbering the six figures and there’s only 10,000 (yeah, only…) for the Incredible, but I like the Verizon network and don’t want to switch to AT&T which has that VERY ANNOYING exclusive on the iPhone. We can blame Apple for that. I think the Incredible and more Android-based phones coming from other manufacturers represent the first serious challenge to the iPhone.
The Incredible's camera at full zoom. That's John McEnroe signing autographs.
So far, Motorola, Google and HTC (who’s “quietly brilliant” HTC? Click here) have designed and manufacturered Android phones for the U.S. market, but can Nokia, Samsung, LG and maybe even Apple be far behind?
The Incredible’s resident applications are too numerous to comprehensively review, but the 8-megapixel camera and video cam are exceptional. The zoom leaves something to be desired as my photos show, but you can upload photos and the MP4’s videos directly to e-mail, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook other social media sites directly from the Incredible (for video, a WIFI connection is required). Any video beyond 30 seconds takes a few minutes and sometimes a couple of tries. After all, this is only 1-2 Megabit per second 3G technology – much faster 4G will fix that.
Check out my home office video below shot with the Incredible. I also shot my yard, but the Incredible’s mike picked up the crashing sound of a stiff wind. Both of these will confirm my non-standing as a professional videographer.
The camera comes 8GB of memory and you can add a 16GB SD card. The 25-30 second videos I’ve been shooting take between 6-8MB so I won’t be running out of RAM any time soon unless I shoot a full length motion picture with the Incredible.
