HTC Incredible S Review

Expensive, but the best Android smartphone in the market until the dual-cores come along.

The HTC Incredible S wasn't love at first sight for me. That may be because it is just another 'droid, or it is simply down to the horrible name. Nokia may bore you to death with robotic naming convention, but on the other hand, HTC blurs the line between creativity and hilarity with phones such as HTC Hero, Trophy, Rider, Flyer, Dream and Chacha. However, I can't seem to get my hands off this phone - banal nomenclature notwithstanding. The device may not look stunning, but it blends subtlety with out-of-the-box design cues. While it certainly can't beat Nokia N8's excellent anodized aluminium unibody, the attention to detail that HTC has put into the Incredible S is remarkable nonetheless.



Unboxing and Introduction

The phone supports PC charging through the micro-USB cable, HTC also throws in a wall-socket-to-USB adapter for the times when you don't have access to a PC. The supplied headset sticks to tradition with its ugly looks and lacklustre sound quality. Since the phone has only 1GB of internal memory, the retail package mercifully includes an 8 GB microSD card. A rubberised plastic construction provides a comfortable grip over the device. It is good to see HTC experiment with the body material, instead of replicating the design cues of phones such as iPhone and Samsung Galaxy series. The back-cover protrudes along the outline of the battery, but instead of forming a rectangle, it assumes the shape of a SIM card.

The phone has dimensions of 120 x 64 x 11.7 mm and weighs 135.5 g. The Incredible S sports a 4" S-LCD display, which is nothing short of spectacular. The panel has pixel dimensions of 480x800. Despite being an LCD, the display is as good as any fancy AMOLED or Super-AMOLED display. It delivers vivid colours with great contrasts and maintains definition even over acute viewing angles. Sadly, the display tends to reflect light. Even though the text remains readable, the colours seem to fade out under the sun.

Just below the display are four capacitive keys - Home, Menu, Back, and Search. Being capacitive, the keys won't react to anything but your finger. The placement of these keys and the backlight goes perfectly with the display. These capacitive keys even auto-rotate along with it; while that adds nothing to functionality, it looks damn good.

A lock/power button and a 3.5 mm jack reside at the top edge. The volume rocker on the left edge of the phone is flanked by a bare micro-USB port. The right edge has nothing, where a camera key is conspicuous by its absence. Not only does it rob one of the pleasures of using the phone like a standalone camera, but it prevents one-touch-triggering of the autofocus feature. The rear bears a relatively large lens with dual-LED flash and a loudspeaker grille.

The battery cover is easy to release, as long as you can pry it open with your fingernails. It reveals a SIM Card and a MicroSD memory card slot. The bundled 8GB memory card isn't sufficient to hold a good collection of music and movies. A miserly 1 GB internal memory doesn't help matters either. That's a shame when the market is rife with the likes of Nokia N8 and Samsung Galaxy S - both of which boast of 16 GB internal storage. A gigabyte will never be sufficient, considering the number of Android apps available - most of which will be installed to the internal memory.

HTC Clones Nexus One, Launches 3 New Phones

It’s just the beginning of the year and already HTC is on a roll. The company has announced three new smartphones — two of those will run Google’s Android operating system — and a redesigned user interface that aggregates social networking feeds.

The three new HTC phones are HTC Legend, a Nexus One clone called HTC Desire and HTC HD Mini, the only one in the pack to run Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. The phones have been designed by One & Co, the San Francisco-based design firm that HTC acquired in December 2008.

“HTC Legend and HTC Desire take Android to another level in both substance and style,” said HTC President Peter Chou in a statement.

Thanks to its close partnership with Google, HTC has emerged as a powerhouse maker of Android devices. The company designed the first phone to run Android, the T-Mobile G1. In January, HTC’s Nexus One became the first smartphone to be sold by Google.

Last June, HTC introduced Sense, a user interface that allows users to set up profiles for work and play and has widgets that bring in data from different social networking streams such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Since then, the idea of aggregating all those feeds and offering them to customers through a single window has popular among cellphone makers. HTC rival Motorola got a jump on the idea with MotoBlur, an interface that aggregates Facebook and Twitter feeds and debuted on the Cliq.

HTC has tried to mimic that with its HTC Friend Stream that organizes updates from different online sources into a single flow. Friend Stream also lets users organize their contacts into different social circles such as groups of friends, colleagues or even high school friends.

All three of HTC’s phones announced Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain, will include the updated Sense interface.

Yet another Android phone from HTC, the Desire, with its 3.7 inch OLED display, is closest to the Nexus One in terms of its technical prowess and features.

The Desire uses the same Qualcomm 1-GHz Snapdragon processor that we have seen in the Nexus One phone. It has a 3.7-inch display and weighs about 4.7 ounces. It also runs Android 2.1, the latest version of the Android operating system, first seen on the Nexus One.

The Desire, formerly known as HTC Bravo, supports Adobe Flash 10.1. It has a 5-megapixel camera with flash and geotagging capability, digital compass, FM radio, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.

The phone has an optical joystick surrounded by a narrow button instead of a trackball in an attempt to ostensibly improve usability.

Desire will initially be available in Europe and Australia before the second half of the year, says HTC.

Google phone to hit Indian stores in December

Taiwanese handset major High Tech Computer (HTC) is planning to launch the Android platform-powered phone (popularly referred to as the Google phone) in India this December.

The price, however, will be higher than the US debut tag of around Rs 8,200 ($179).

Ajay Sharma, country manager, HTC (India), told Business Standard: “We would prefer a mobile operator tie-up to introduce the Google phone in India in December.”

HTC’s G1 (the Google phone model) will cost more since “the Indian market does not work on the handset subsidy model".

Android is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices that was announced in November last year and developed by the Open Handset Alliance — a group comprising players like Google, HTC, Intel, Motorola and Samsung.

Research firm Strategy Analytics has predicted that the G1 could sell 400,000 units by the end of 2008, accounting for 4 per cent of the smart-phone market.

To spur the growth of third-party applications, Google recently announced the Android Market, similar to Apple's App Store, where consumers can buy and download content for its mobile platform.

Labelled as competition to Apple’s iPhone, which is priced at Rs 31,000 for the 8GB model, the HTC G1 could be priced cheaper to maintain an edge in India. Currently, HTC has smart-phones in the Indian market priced between Rs 10,000 and Rs 35,000. Google India officials were unavailable for comment.

HTC’s device is a 3G phone with a touch-screen, slider keyboard, GPS and Wi-Fi.

HTC India, which has an exclusive partnership with Airtel, is also open to selling the G1 phone through independent retail channels. “We will decide the business model soon,” said Sharma.

He believes that Google’s software platform and operating system for mobile devices has the benefit of leveraging on more than 100 million online web users as well as its open source development platform and advertising-oriented business model.

Although India does not have 3G yet, Sharma said applications like maps and search could find takers. “We expect to build volumes in India and the Android-based phone should make HTC a bigger player in the wireless handset market,” he said.

HTC India hopes to sell 600,000 mobile devices in 2009, having doubled sales this year from 100,000 in 2007.
platform-powered phone (popularly referred to as the

Google takes aim at Apple's iPhone

If you've ever wished you could put Google in your pocket, you'll have the opportunity soon - quite literally. The search-engine company is on the verge of releasing a software suite to run all aspects of mobile phones.

Google is not manufacturing phones but instead making the software for them - called Android - and relying on a consortium of hardware partners to make handsets in an array of shapes and sizes.

In stark contrast to Apple's "one handset fits all" strategy with the iPhone, Google is hoping to mix Nokia's approach of "a handset to suit every style" with Microsoft's tactic of making the software, then winning market share by roping in many partner companies.

However, while Microsoft charges phone makers for its Windows Mobile software, Google's Android software will be free. Google says it just wants to create the ultimate internet-enabled mobile phone. The payoff for Google is obvious: more consumers of Google services, especially in large developing countries such as India and China, where many people have their first contact with the internet through their mobile phone.

"What's good for the web is good for Google," says Dan Morrill, a Google developer advocate in the US. "The more comfortable with using the web that users are, the more frequently they'll do a Google search.

"We needed it to exist ... we took a look at the mobile space and realised some of the things we wanted to do were not possible in the current landscape of the mobile industry."

What could Google not do? "It came down to permission," he says. "As a PC user, when you open your web browser, you don't have to ask your ISP's permission to change the homepage. When you want to install software, you don't have to go to your computer maker and ask permission."

Morrill is referring to the way telcos have controlled the settings on mobile phones to funnel users back into their WAP portals and the way companies such as Apple have full control over what software can be installed on an iPhone.

"We wanted to create a platform that was open from end to end," he says.

Given its history of free services, Google may also win market share quickly by providing premium services such as push email - where email is delivered to the phone instantly - and free, rather than levying a monthly or annual fee as do BlackBerry maker RIM and iPhone maker Apple. "I can't comment specifically," Morrill says, "but it is safe to say we are not going to radically change our business model of providing value to users, just because this is a mobile device."

Four handset makers are already publicly committed to Google's Open Handset Alliance consortium: HTC, LG, Samsung and Motorola. Several of the world's largest telcos have pledged support, including China Mobile, Japan's NTT DoCoMo and US telcos Sprint and T-Mobile (no Australian telcos have yet publicly declared membership of the consortium but are expected to sell the Google phones anyway).

The first Android mobile phone, called HTC Dream, is tipped to be unveiled within a month. Leaked photos show a touch-screen handset with a large iPhone-style screen, as well as a trackball for navigation and a slide-out qwerty keyboard.

As with the iPhone, Android phones will feature cutting-edge technologies, such as touch screens, accelerometers for sensing movement and GPS receivers for satellite navigation. They will have a web browser that displays pages just like a computer web browser (it uses the Webkit rendering engine - the same one in Apple Safari and the iPhone).

Google says its software is much more open than Apple's. Both companies are promoting their phones as mini computers that can run hundreds of handy, bite-sized applications from third-party developers but Google aims for them to be sold in a much less restrictive way.

Apple, a famously secretive and controlling company, requires anyone who wants to create programs to run on the iPhone to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prevents them from telling anyone about their experiences (good or bad) in programming for the iPhone. Then, once they have created their application, it has to be approved by Apple to be sold and installed through Apple's iTunes software.

Some iPhone application developers have been frustrated by Apple's arbitrary decisions to pull their applications from sale without explanation or notice. One company created an application for iPhone that allowed it to be used as a laptop modem and, after releasing the software for sale, Apple removed it without explanation. Another company created a 99c whoopee cushion application, which Apple refused to release, despite having no rules for developers about bodily noises in applications.

Google is promising Android will have the same ease of use as the iPhone, with a Google-provided online store providing a central place to install applications on an Android phone, without Apple's heavy-handed approach.

Developers will be free to create software for Android phones and publish it via the Google Android Market.

Google's mobile phone software has been released under an open-source licence, meaning anyone is able to download the programming code and modify it. It's the same programming model that has been eating away at Microsoft's market share for years (the popular Firefox browser, for example, is open source).

Such an approach differs starkly from the tightly controlled software platforms used by handset makers in the past. This, analysts say, resulted in slow improvements in mobile-phone software and lack of interest from software developers in making mobile-phone applications.

Internet enthusiasts are excited by the potential for mobile phones that can be easily upgraded with new features.

"Hopefully, with Google releasing the source code to Android, people will start making cool variants that you'll be able to flash your Android phone with," says Phil Sweeney, news editor of broadband enthusiast site whirlpool.net.au.

"Just think, people hack existing mobile phones, GPS navigators, cameras with modifications of firmware already. Just imagine what they will be able to do when they have the raw source code to a mobile phone operating system to play with."

However, this openness also poses a risk for Android, says Allen Nogee, an analyst for In-Stat/MDR in Arizona. "Android can run on many types of phones, which means that not all Android applications may run on your phone," he says.

"With the BlackBerry or iPhone, you'll pay more for the device but you'll know the applications offered for these phones will likely work on your phone. With Android there will be many phones and [probably] many applications but compatibility is not assured.

"Developers will need to accommodate many screen sizes, layouts and phone feature sets. The risk is that the user experience might be bad and the tech knowledge required to get it all working might be high, where any non-techy people may be put-off by the experience."