NEW ORLEANS -- A new pillar of HTC's smartphone lineup has arrived, but its grand unveiling is anything but majestic. Verizon introduced the HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE to kick off the CTIA Wireless convention in New Orleans, but while walking around the showroom floor, and stopping by Verizon's two separate booths, you wouldn't know the phone is in attendance.
That's because Verizon brought just two of the handsets to the wireless industry event, and neither of the Droids are sitting in a display of any sort. Instead, Verizon officials are carrying the phones in their suit pockets and showing them off to journalists one by one.
It's a bit of a shame, really. I met up with Verizon spokesman Albert Aydin at CTIA, and spent about a half-hour playing with the new smartphone. The upshot? It's worthy of much more showy treatment than the old, "Oh, check out what I happen to be carrying with me" trick.
In my limited time with the Incredible 4G LTE, I found the phone's performance to be fast. It launched apps, loaded websites, and played video with ease on Verizon's 4G network from within New Orleans' Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The speed can be attributed, in part, to a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, clocked at 1.2GHz, and 1GB of RAM.
Sense 4, HTC's user interface, is skinned over the top of Google's Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system, and offers the same pleasing software experience found on HTC's One X and One S. Sense 4 isn't a better user interface than the unaltered Android 4 you'll find in Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, but it's one of the few manufacturer-imposed skins that doesn't egregiously intrude on the basic Android experience.
One of the most impressive features in the new Incredible is its 4-inch screen. These days, it's rare to see a new Android phone with a display so small, as most competitors are measuring in with 4.5-inch (or larger) screens. If you like a larger screen, that's fine and there are more than enough choices in the smartphone wilderness to choose from. But if you prefer a smaller screen -- one you could more easily navigate with a single hand -- the Incredible 4G LTE must be considered.
Verizon's Aydin couldn't provide details on the screen's pixel density, but the super LCD display looked better than just about any other screen I've seen with a 960x540 "qHD" resolution.
Aydin also couldn't say when the Incredible 4G LTE would land in stores, or how much it will cost when it does. But others at Verizon did say that review units should be headed our way soon, so stay tuned for a full post-CTIA review. This isn't a smartphone we'll be hiding to ourselves.
