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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aNYthing24 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The One S has a Super AMOLED display, not a Super LCD.Omega215D - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Kind of strange how battery life differs from other reviews. So far only a couple have said subpar life while more have gotten good to very good usage time. Could it be a problem with the phone itself? Well, it's nice to know my Rezound isn't too bad but I do like the designs of both the Incredible and Rezound.pikahatonjon - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
what is with the differences with the EVO 4G LTE & the Htc One X (att) in the contrast test.also, is the Tmobile Galaxy S 3 actually brighter than the At&t galaxy s 3. arent the 4 phones listed above pretty much identical to each other( one series & galaxy s series) what is with the huge diference in the brightness/contrast test
Rockmandash12 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The One X has a Super LCD 2 display, not a TFT display.JimmiG - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
How many more years until Android phones can match the iPhone 4S in terms of 3G web browsing battery life?The Nexus One got 3.77 hours back in 2010 vs 4.5 hours for the iPhone 3G. Fast forward to 2012, and the iPhone 4S has more than doubled the battery life to 9.85 hours, while most Android devices have just barely caught up with the iPhone 3G.
Clearly Apple uses the same batteries as everyone else, so it must come down to incredibly lazy programming and poor power use optimization on the Android side. Some OEMs have apparently taken it in their own hands to optimize battery usage (Samsung, HTC), but this should really be something provided by the core Android OS. Battery life should be the main focus on for the next version of Android!
zorxd - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The iPhone has a small display. It consume a lot less. AMOLED displays are also not very efficient for displaying white backgrounds found on many web sites.Android's battery life isn't bad. Just look at the cellular talk time.
lunarx3dfx - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
What zorx said. You can't compare the iPhone and most Android phones Apples to Apples because of design differences. I'd be willing to bet money that if you had identical devices, the only difference being that one has an A5 and one has an S4, the S4 would wipe the floor with the A5 in every category except for maybe GPU performance.Not only is the S4 almost certainly more energy efficient due to be being a newer architecture, but it will also smoke it in terms of performance per watt.
A5= Dual Cortex A9's @ 800 MHz
S4= Dual Krait Snapdragons @ 1.5 GHz
On top of clock speed Krait is the ONLY ARM based CPU on the market with out of order execution which is why it is faster than Quad Core CPU's (Exynos 4 and Tegra 3).
Jimmi, I would recommend that you learn a bit about how all of this works before you comment again. The iPhone is a good device (although you couldn't pay me to use one), but in terms of theoretical performance it was out-dated before it was ever even announced.
Phasenoise - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
He indicated, as the article states, that the iphone has superior 3g web browsing battery life.So, for him, perhaps picking display or CPU technologies which consume more power is a poor trade off. He doesn't appear to be interested in theoretical performance, just actual real world browsing usage which as we know is generally not Incredibly taxing (pun intended).
lunarx3dfx - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The reason I brought up performance, was to illustrate my point that Apple doesn't necessarily make a more efficient product as much as they use low power components. I'll admit that I did get a little lost in my own argument. Oops.JimmiG - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
We will see when the next iPhone comes out with a much bigger display and higher clock speeds but still better battery life. The same thing can be seen with Windows vs OSX on laptops with similar specs - Apple simply spends more time optimizing the software side of their mobile devices.It's not limited to just AMOLED displays, and secondly, the CPU should not spend a lot of time at the highest clockspeed and voltage when you're browsing, especially with 3G which should be bandwidth limited. Unless of course the system is poorly optimized.
I'm an Android user myself, and battery life is the Achilles heel of the system. At the end of the day, my Optimus 2X is down to ~15% of battery while coworkers' iPhones last for two days without charging. It was the same with the Nexus One before that.
Just like the unresponsive and choppy user interface, it's important to realize when there's a problem that needs to be fixed.