HTC Droid Incredible on Verizon - early thoughts

OK so I've only had this phone for 2 hours, but here's my brief early review.

The specs & features are reproduced in abundance all over the web so I won't copy them out here, but suffice to say that the HTC Droid is a powerful Android device running HTC's own Sense UI.

Sense UI is more than just some user interface tweaks and widgets - HTC have modified the Android code right down at the root level from the lock screen to the home screens, widgets and even the e-mail application. Whilst for the most part Sense adds functionality on top of Google's already capable codebase, there are a few things that I initially miss from my Motorola Droid's feature list. Mainly I can't find a way of viewing a combined Inbox. I'm sure it's there somewhere, but I can't find it!

The new social widgets are pretty good - twitter and friend feed (which includes a twitter feed anyway) work well as homescreen widgets. The only drawback is that they only work in portrait mode, so when you're typing into them you can't use the landscape keyboard which is much easier.

My worry about Sense is that it's so ingrained into Android, any update of the Android codebase will no doubt involve a lot of work for HTC, which in turn leads to significant delays to HTC software upgrades. I hope that HTC realise this could be a problem and are already prepared to update for Froyo.

The phone itself is roughly the same with and length as the Droid but a bit thinner as it doesn't have the physical keyboard. However, it feels much much lighter in your hand.

The four buttons at the bottom are the same but in a different order. Whilst this is no big deal, it's frustrating after getting used to my Droid's button layout.

The screen is superb - colors are vivid and bright inside. Looking at an angle adds a strange blue/green tint, and outside it can be hard to see in bright daylight. Time will tell if this is a real problem or not.

The camera is absolutely superb. Pictures outside are sharp with great color, although there can be a bit of ghosting on long focus pictures. Low light pics are pretty good due to the dual-LED flash. The camera app is much more responsive than the Droid app which is a welcome enhancement.

The phone is very snappy due to the 1GHz Snapdragon processor (in comparison to Droid's ~550MHz processor). Home screen scrolling is smooth, pinch to zoom in browser/maps/email is responsive and I've not yet seen any slow down, although as I install and use more apps that may change.

One (very minor) disappointment is that there are no docking ports. The Droid didn't have them either, but at least it had magnetic sensors so it knew when it was in the desktop dock or car dock. Whilst I didn't have either dock, it would have been nice to know I could slot this into something to use it as a media player or car GPS without having to plug things into it.

OK, well that's all for now. Well report back later on further thoughts!

UPDATE: Added photo gallery: http://blog.preinvent.com/htc_incredible_gallery