HTC Incredible S deals & review

The HTC Incredible S is the follow up to last year’s popular HTC DROID Incredible smartphone. This handset was a great success in the U.S., though it may be unfamiliar to many in the U.K. as it never received a European release.

The Incredible S brings a range of upgrades to its predecessor, including increased RAM from 512 to 768 MB, a display enlarged from 3.7” to 4” and the inclusion of a front facing camera for video calls. The Incredible S was announced alongside two other follow-up phones from HTC, the Wildfire S and Desire S, and like those handsets this phone omits the optical trackpad and physical push-buttons sported by its predecessor in favour of all touch controls and capacitive keys.

Though the size and hardware of the Incredible S have been altered from the original DROID Incredible, the phone pays homage to the overall design by recreating the uniquely contoured back panel, albeit in an altered form.

When the Incredible S was first released, there was some disappointment that it shipped with Android 2.2 Froyo, rather than the newer Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system included on many contemporary devices. However, updates to Gingerbread are now available for download, making this much less of an issue.

The Incredible S has a solid specifications sheet, though it falls someway short of dual-core competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy S II or HTC’s own Sensation in terms of raw performance. Still, with HTC’s excellent Sense UI, very good generally performance, a unique design and premium construction, the Incredible S is an excellent all-rounder and a very good choice for those who want a smooth and responsive smartphone experience at a lower price point than the top of the range superphones.

At the time of writing, the HTC Incredible S is available on contracts from O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

The HTC Incredible S is very much a part of the current trend of sleek, black and monolithic smartphones, but has a few noteworthy touches to its design that separate and distinguish it nicely from the hordes of similarly constructed handsets.

Front on and powered off, the Incredible S is the quintessential modern smartphone – an almost uniform plane of black metal and glass, combining smoothed corners with rigid lines. Flip the handset around, though, and you find a raised and smoothly rounded panel protruding from the rubberised plastic back of the device. I found that this unique feature provided a comfortable surface to rest my fingertips on, at whichever angle and in whichever hand I held the phone. HTC have described the design of the Incredible S as “industrial” and I think that’s a very good term for the combination of aesthetic distinction and ergonomic practicality afforded by the uniquely contoured chassis of the Incredible S.

The phone is towards the larger end of the smartphone spectrum with its 4” screen housed in a 120 by 64mm body, though it is not quite as large as HTC’s flagship phone at the time of writing, the HTC Sensation. At 11.7mm thick it’s by no means a chubby handset, though it has distinctly more bulk than Samsung’s market leading Galaxy S II, which is a paper-thin 8.49mm.

The front frame surrounding the screen of the handset is metal, coated with a matte black finish that matches the rubberised plastic back cover in both look and feel. Though there seems to be significantly less metal in the construction of the Incredible S than in the majority of contemporary HTC phones, the materials have the feel of quality and the handset has a good, solid weight in the palm.

The phone is very well put together, with only the thinnest of lines marking the join between the front and back panels. Even with a thorough twisting and pulling there was no wobble or give in the handset, as I’ve found in some phones with lower quality construction. One slight drawback of the thoroughly solid design of the Incredible S is that the back panel can be quite challenging to remove. A small notch along the bottom edge of the handset provides a little purchase for prising the back cover off, but the notch is so small and the cover so firmly attached that this is not an easy task. Once the panel has been removed, though, you can access the battery, SD card and SIM card slots, and these are all easy to use and not too fiddly.

The HTC Incredible S has only two physical keys along its outer edges. There’s a power key located at the right side of the top edge and a volume rocker at the top of the left edge, which can be pushed up or down. These keys are quite discrete – painted black and blending nicely into the frame of the phone, they protrude slightly and have just the right amount of resistance so that they’re easy to operate and yet difficult to trigger accidentally.

Four further touch-sensitive function keys are located along the bottom of the screen. These are the phone’s “Home”, “Settings”, “Back” and “Search” buttons. The keys light up and, in another of the Incredible S’ distinguishing design features, actually rotate to match the orientation of the phone. While this is a unique and stylish feature, I did think that the implementation wasn’t quite perfect. Because of the way the rotation is achieved, when you hold the phone in portrait orientation the landscape oriented key is still faintly visible and vice versa. I did have to look closely to notice this, though, and it’s still a pretty neat feature to show off to your friends.

The touchscreen of the HTC Incredible S is a 4” capacitive Super LCD unit, featuring 16 million colours and an 800 x 600 resolution. The screen is certainly a striking feature and its vibrant colour reproduction is worthy of particular note. I’ll discuss HTC’s excellent Sense UI in more detail later, but one of its properties worth mentioning at this stage is that much of it is doused in bright colour; the screen of the Incredible S manages to showcase this brilliantly.

The 800 x 600 resolution of the Incredible S isn’t the very highest available on the current market. Apple’s iPhone 4, for example, boasts a 960 x 640 resolution, spread across a smaller 3.5” screen for a significantly higher pixel density. That said, the Incredible S’ resolution is high enough to produce images and text that are crisp and clear and, frankly, I had to hold the phone close to my eye and squint a little to notice any pixilation. In general use you won’t find yourself in that position too often, so while not market leading, the resolution of the Incredible S can be said to be more than adequate.

The screen is very bright so in indoor lighting conditions you can set it to one of its lower light settings to conserve battery and still maintain excellent visibility. I found that in direct sunlight it’s more or less necessary to set the brightness to maximum, though the screen does perform reasonably well outdoors and remains comfortably visible on all but the brightest days. Like the vast majority of modern smartphones, though, on the brightest days you’ll need to shade the screen to get decent visibility.

The 8 megapixel rear-facing camera packed into the HTC Incredible S is quite an impressive affair and with good lighting conditions can capture some excellent, sharp images. As you might expect, the camera of the Incredible S is at its best on a bright, sunny day. In these conditions the camera can capture a surprising amount of detail. The autofocus works very well and the camera copes with stark light/shadow contrast excellently.

Indoor performance is also surprisingly good, though low light conditions do cause some speckling on pictures. The dual LED flash helps produce much sharper images and reduces the speckling almost entirely, though the trade-off for this is that like most flashes it generates a somewhat cold and harsh light. I was particularly pleased with the autofocus in low light conditions – with or without the flash, the Incredible S managed to focus well on its target.

The Incredible S can record video at up to 720p. For a phone camera, I felt that the video recording was very good. It captures motion reasonably well and in good lighting conditions the images produced can be quite sharp. I did find that colours could be a little over saturated and that the lens didn’t focus too well on objects in the middle distance, but these were minor concerns. Overall, the video camera of the HTC Incredible S is a solid offering.

Finally on the camera front, there’s a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. There’s not too much to say about this one. It’s a nice addition to the handset and does its task well – namely, being of good enough quality for a video call. In fact, my surprised supervisor informed me that the video quality of the call I made to him with the Incredible S was better than the quality from my laptop’s webcam – quite impressive for a smartphone’s secondary camera!

The Incredible S has the standard external connections for a modern smartphone - a micro USB port for charging and connecting to computers and other devices and a 3.5 mm socket for headphones. The headphone socket is at the top of the phone and, as with most of the current generation of HTC handsets, the USB port is located at the bottom of the left edge of the device.

I’ve found with the Incredible S and with other HTC phones that the micro USB lead can get in the way a little when charging and holding the phone in your left hand. This is a minor niggle, however, and likely down to the way I personally hold the phone as much as anything. No such problems with the headphone socket – it’s logically positioned at the top of the phone. HTC bundle a set of basic, if oddly shaped, earphones with the handset and though they’re nothing too special, they get the job done. The earphones include three physical buttons to play/pause, skip tracks forward or backwards in the music app or change channels in HTC’s snazzy FM radio app.

The Incredible S also has all the wireless connectivity features you’d expect of a modern smartphone – WiFi, 3G, and Bluetooth are all present and correct. There’s no infrared port, but who uses infrared ports these days, anyway? The WiFi receiver packed into the phone performed particularly well for me and tenaciously held onto the local network as I wandered out of the office to test the screen in direct sunlight. Obviously, there are other factors at work here such as the conditions on the day and the layout of the building, but I’ve tested some phones that lost connection the moment the door swung shut behind me.

Out of the box, the HTC Incredible S reported 1.05 GB of available internal storage space. This is a little on the small side, considering that Samsung’s Galaxy S II comes with either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage and LG’s Optimus 2X comes with 8 GB. Still, this is the general trend with HTC handsets which tend to include a small amount of internal storage on the expectation that users will employ SD cards for the majority of their data needs. In this regard, HTC have been fairly generous in bundling a more than adequate 8 GB micro SD card with the Incredible S, with support for cards up to 32 GB in capacity.

HTC have been particularly keen to draw people’s attention to the maps and navigation features of the HTC Incredible S. And with good reason, I think. While all Android phones have access to maps and turn-by-turn navigation through Google Maps, this is an online service and requires an internet connection to download the maps and plan routes. This always seemed a bit limited to me because I usually only need maps services when I’m going further afield than the end of my street, and when I go that little bit further afield I often find that the network I chose because of its excellent 3G coverage in my area has no coverage whatsoever 20 miles down the road. This leads to my usually all-knowing smartphone suddenly becoming as lost as I am.

HTC have solved this issue by including their own maps application on the HTC Incredible S which stores maps in the memory of the phone. I found the app to be excellent. It takes a little time to plan a route out if you’re going far but it tends to pick a sensible path and has yet to direct me into any lakes or brick walls. As an added bonus, storing the necessary data directly on the phone allows for much faster scrolling around maps, for those of us who prefer to plan our own routes. Combined with an accurate and quick GPS, this makes the Incredible S a genuinely feasible replacement for a ‘proper’ SatNav.

The HTC Incredible S is powered by a 1 GHz Scorpion processor with an Adreno 205 graphics processing unit. This is the same chipset used in the HTC Desire S and Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, among numerous other devices, and is something of a standard among modern smartphones. The processor is backed up with a respectable 768 MB of RAM.

While the processor of the Incredible S is certainly no slouch, in terms of raw performance I wouldn’t really expect it to be able to keep up with the dual-core chips touted by the current batch of top-end handsets and this assumption is generally backed up by the Quadrant score I recorded for the device. With a quadrant score of 1425, the Incredible S performs comfortably better in this test than older handsets like the original Desire or Galaxy S, but not up to the standard of dual-core monsters like the Galaxy S II.

Hardware benchmarks aside, though, I found little to fault with the performance of the Incredible S. The touchscreen is very responsive and there’s no hint of lag when navigating around the various menus and home screens. The browser is fast and stable, again showing no hint of lag even when displaying relatively complex webpages.

In the tests I conducted, the phone handled multitasking excellently. Switching from internet browsing to checking the maps and back again was no problem at all, so I tried to push the phone a little further by loading up a few games. Impressively, though, the Incredible S happily allowed me to load up Angry Birds and even a 3D racing game alongside the internet browser and maps application without so much as a stutter. With all these apps running in the background, the Incredible S remained smooth and responsive and played videos through YouTube without skipping a beat.

Of course, while it’s nice to know it can be done, running every app you can think of is going to drain your battery pretty fast. Thankfully, the Incredible S has is equipped with a very good battery. With moderate use (sending the occasional message, making the occasional call) I didn’t have to pick up the charger for over two days. More intensive use will have you running for the power socket sooner, but you should get comfortably over a day’s heavy use from the battery.

As with other HTC phones I’ve reviewed in the past, the Incredible S really excels in usability. Unlike some manufacturer UIs which can feel like superficial skins with few practical uses, HTC’s Sense UI adds a whole range of useful features to the stock Android OS and is one of the stand out features of the handset.

Right from the first power up, the Sense UI makes using the phone as simple as possible. When the phone is first turned on, HTC’s Setup utility is launched and takes you through everything from transferring contacts from your old phone via Bluetooth to getting connected to your local WiFi network. There’s even a tutorial on operating on-screen keyboard, which is one of the best I’ve used. The keyboard automatically corrects most typos you might make so that typing out messages is quick and easy, even with the keyboard in the smaller portrait mode.

Once you’ve gone through the setup process, you reach the main interface of the Incredible S. The user interface is centred around 7 homescreens that are highly customisable. You can add different skins and backgrounds, shortcuts to apps and any of a wide range of widgets to the homescreens. The range of widgets pre-installed on the phone by HTC includes their famous weather widget, their Friend Steam widget which aggregates your social media feeds directly onto a homepage, a messaging widget that allows you to flick through your SMS messages, a location widget that takes you through to HTC’s maps service and many more. The HTC widgets are all well designed and a real selling point of the phone. There’s even a large collection of extra widgets online that you can choose from and download.

Another handy feature of the Sense UI is the ability to select between several “Scenes”. These are basically sets of pre-configured homescreens designed around differing activities like “Work” or “Travel”. The great thing about this is that all of the scenes are customisable, so I was able to get the phone set up how I wanted it for “Work”, with calendar, email and news widgets, then flick easily over to “Play” at the end of the day, where I’d set up the homescreens with music and social networking widgets.

The Incredible S has access to the Android Market, with over 250,000 apps available to download at the time of writing. With some handsets, the choice is limited by the phone’s hardware and software specifications and so this figure can be misleading. As mentioned previously, though, the Incredible S has little difficulty running even the more complex applications and games and with updates to Android 2.3 Gingerbread available, there should be little limiting your options. More or less the only apps that are off-limits to the Incredible S are the small batch of dual-core only games available on the market. There aren’t too many of these at the moment, but they tend to be the most graphically impressive games – worth bearing in mind if you’re a hardcore gamer.

There are pre-installed apps on the Incredible S to cover the majority of ordinary activities. HTC’s Friend Stream social media widget is a little on the basic side, but certainly gets the job done. It allows you to view Twitter, Facebook and Flickr updates in a convenient single stream on your homepage, and lets you post quick replies across multiple accounts. For those who want a more in-depth experience, HTC have also included official Facebook and Twitter apps pre-installed on the phone, both of which are excellent.

Those who have Google accounts will likely get the most out of the Incredible S’ range of apps and widgets. Once a Google account is associated with the phone, an impressive amount of content and settings can be synched quickly and easily by the HTC widgets. Google calendar events are automatically pulled up by HTC’s calendar widgets, the News widget pulls up Google Reader subscription lists and allows you to choose which ones you’d like to receive directly to your phone, and, of course, setting up your Google email account is a cinch. There’s a refreshing feeling of synergy in the design of the Sense UI that pervades all of its various bells and whistles.

I found managing music on the device to be a simple task. You can either copy music files directly onto the SD card of the Incredible S, or use the HTC Sync desktop software included on the phone. The Sync software is well designed and simple to use. To transfer music onto the handset you simply point the software at the music directory on your PC and it will copy across all the music files it finds and categorise them by artist and album. Unfortunately, the Sync software is only available for Windows operating systems, so Mac or Linux users won’t be able to use this feature.

Once the Incredible S is stocked up with tunes, you play them using either the Music widget on a homepage or the Music app. The music player has all the features you’d want – it categorises all music by artist and album, you can set up your own playlists, and it’ll happily play away in the background while you get on with other things. Sadly, the external speaker is nothing too spectacular. It can reach a decent enough volume, but suffers from that slightly tinny sound that plagues many smartphone speakers. It’s also not terribly well positioned at the top left of the back of the handset. The raised camera housing keeps the speaker just above any flat surface it’s placed on, but it’s all too easy to cover it up with your finger and muffle the sound when you’re holding the phone.

I found the Incredible S didn’t handle video quite as well as music. The HTC Sync software failed to recognise quite a few video files that the phone was capable of playing and so I had to transfer these manually. Once transferred to the phone, several videos lagged in playback or had audio syncing issues. This seemed to be an issue with the stock video player on the Incredible S and is easily rectified by downloading a third party video player from the Android Market. Still, it was a little disappointing.

Which brings us to the last and most important issue: calls and text messages. I’m pleased to say that the Incredible S handles these extremely well. In-call sound is nice and clear and the volume can be brought up to a decent level, though thankfully not quite ear-splitting. The phone’s dialer is particularly good. Upon pressing the prominent “Phone” button at the bottom of all homescreens you’re presented with a combined T9 number pad and contact book, so you can either dial a number directly, flick down through your contact list to find one, or type in the name of the person you’re looking for. It’s a simple system, but well implemented and very convenient.

SMS messaging is equally well implemented. Messages are threaded, as you’d expect from an Android phone, and include the nice touch of displaying the contact’s image next to each text. Pictures can be assigned directly or synced up with Facebook profiles. As I touched on briefly earlier, the on-screen keyboard of the Incredible S is excellent and makes typing out messages on the phone a very quick and easy process. The phone vibrates very slightly after each key press, providing a nice touch of haptic feedback, and the auto-correct feature is impressively accurate and saves new words as you use them. Overall, an excellent messaging experience.

HTC Desire S - A very similar phone in terms of specifications. The only significant differences between the two are that the Desire S is the smaller of the two, featuring a smaller 3.7” touchscreen but with the same resolution resulting in sharper images, and that the Desire S has a lower resolution 5 megapixel camera.

LG Optimus 2X - As one of the older dual-core handsets available, the LG Optimus 2X is available at a similar price point to the Incredible S. The dual-core credentials of this handset make it worth considering, though many critics consider HTC’s Sense to be superior to LG’s UI.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc - Sony Ericsson’s current flagship Android handset features similar hardware specifications to the Incredible S, but with a larger 4.2” screen employing Sony’s BRAVIA technology.

HTC Sensation - Currently HTC’s top of the range model, the HTC Sensation boasts a 4.2” screen and a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor making it both larger and more powerful than the Incredible S. As a trade-off, the Sensation is also more expensive and may be too large for some people’s tastes.

HTC struck gold with the HTC Desire, released in early 2010, which went on to be one of the best selling phones of the year and the biggest success story for the Chinese manufacturer that is quickly coming to dominate the smartphone market. The Desire was such a hit with consumers that it has spawned a whole range of offspring devices including the Desire Z and the Desire HD. While the Desire Z added an additional QWERTY keyboard the Desire HD took the path of adopting a larger screen for better entertainment value.

At 4.3" the Desire HD features one of the largest smartphone screens on offer and at the time of its release this size was virtually unheard of. While the larger screen undoubtedly makes video and web browsing more enjoyable it also comes with the trade-off of producing a less portable device. This is where the Incredible S makes it appearance, by offering a phone that lies between the original Desire and the much larger Desire HD, providing the perfect combination of portability and visual prowess.

Released alongside the Desire S (i.e. Desire 2), and almost a year after the original Desire, it would have been good to have seen more contemporary features in place on the Incredible S as it seems that the mighty HTC is starting to get complacent. For example, two features that are starting to become ubiquitous in the mobile phone market, dual core processors and gyro sensors, would have been nice additions to this handset.

Although the Incredible S is perhaps not as ground breaking as the original Desire or Desire HD it is still an excellent messaging and entertainment phone. The screen has had an update from the Desire HD´s LCD to now feature a higher quality and more vibrant Super LCD display. The 4" in use is still roomy enough for enjoying videos while at the same time not causing the Incredible S to be as excessively bulky as some supersized smartphones.

The Incredible S comes with excellent music and video support with its media player, as well as an FM radio and online video support through YouTube. The Incredible S is also great fun for making use of games with many games available from Android Market. You can also entertain yourself online with the 4" screen being ideal for enjoying web content, and with speedy 3G and Wi-Fi connections on offer. Wi-Fi now comes with DLNA support on the Incredible S so that you can link up the phone to other DLNA devices such as a TV, allowing you to watch videos through a larger screen perhaps.

With Google Android Froyo upgradeable to Android Gingerbread, and with HTC´s trusty Sense interface in place the Incredible S packs some excellent social networking integration for all the popular social networks. Threaded SMS is in use and the Incredible S comes with other ways to keep in touch through email and instant messaging.

The Incredible S is an excellent entertainment phone that offers the perfect compromise between the Desire´s portability and the Desire HD´s spacious screen. The Incredible S could have been even more incredible S if it had adopted some more contemporary phone features such as dual core processors, but this is not to detract in any way from what is an otherwise superlative messaging, entertainment and web browsing device.