NEW ORLEANS—Is this CTIA the Small Phone Show? Petite but powerful, Verizon's "Droid Incredible 4G LTE by HTC" joined AT&T's Samsung Focus 2 in showing you can deliver an up-to-the-moment smartphone experience with a 4-inch screen.
The third entry in the HTC Droid Incredible line, the Incredible 4G (as a Verizon rep called it) is a petite, solid, and well-built phone that will fit well even in smaller hands. Several of the characteristic Incredible design touches are still here: the red accents and the shaped, grooved back, for instance. The deep grooves make the Incredible 4G feel like few other phones on the market.
Turn on the phone and you get Android 4.0 on a 960-by-540, non-PenTile Super LCD screen. This version of Android has been heavily customized, though. It has HTC Sense 4.0, which is a generally good skin that adds useful widgets and Facebook integration; we've liked it on the HTC One X and One S. But it's also laden down with Verizon bloatware (15 items!) and has the grim-looking, red-and-black Droid theme slapped onto it. Fortunately, you can change the theme, though I didn't check to see if you can delete the bloatware.
The Incredible 4G feels speedy, with a 1.2-GHz Qualcomm S4 processor and Verizon's LTE network. I loaded some Web pages and flipped through apps and didn't see any delays. There's 8GB of onboard memory, along with a MicroSD memory card slot. The 1700 mAh battery is easily removable. Of course, the phone has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the usual other features.
This is like Verizon's response to the HTC One S, but it's clearly not a One S. The One S is slimmer, faster, and uses a different screen. Both the Incredible 4G and One S have Beats Audio, but it isn't clear whether the Incredible 4G has HTC's new Image Sense image processor. Speed-wise and size-wise, it's also competing closely with the LG Viper 4G on Sprint and the LG Connect 4G on MetroPCS, although both of those phones are running Android 2.3 for now.
Now about that name. Even Verizon employees admit "Droid Incredible 4G LTE by HTC" is unwieldy, sort of like Sprint's "Samsung Galaxy S, Epic 4G Touch" (yes, the comma is part of the name.)
But that's what you get, for now, on Sprint and Verizon, where the carrier is usually heavily involved in device design. AT&T and T-Mobile, which use the global GSM standard, can take international phones. But Verizon and Sprint are two of the world's largest CDMA carriers, and they often decide that their own brands are stronger than manufacturer brands. Thus the names, which play on previous phones the carrier sold.
Verizon didn't announce a sale date or price for the Droid Incredible 4G LTE by HTC, except to say that it would be available "in the coming weeks."
