Review: HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE for Verizon Wireless
The Incredible runs Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” with HTC Sense 4. The system software and user interface are similar to those of the One X and One S, though Verizon Wireless's influence is obvious.
The lock screen on the Incredible offers a handful of customizable shortcuts. You can set up to four apps/actions on the lock screen that will launch when you drag them down to the little ring at the bottom of the screen. The defaults are phone, mail, messages, and camera, but you can adjust these at will. One useful lock screen feature is that you can have a camera shortcut and a passcode at the same time.
The central home screen panels all have a permanent dock at the bottom of the screen that holds five app shortcuts — the same four as the lock screen, plus the main app menu. These can be customized if you wish.
There are three buttons below the display: Back, Home, Multitask. The first two are self-explanatory. Pressing the Multitask button reveals a graphical view of all the recently used applications. The hardware Menu button has been removed entirely in Android 4.0, which is annoying, but that's mostly Google's fault.
HTC has jazzed up the appearance of Android 4.0, but there are so many options in Settings, it takes a little while to learn where everything is.
The drop-down notification shade collects notifications as before, but with Android 4.0 you can now dismiss individual notifications by swiping them sideways. Access to the full settings menu is available from the notification shade, as are on/off basic toggles for the wireless radios.
Apps in the app menu are laid out in a grid. Swipe the pages to the left and you'll eventually jump from apps to a list of all the widgets that are available. The widget menu lets you see what the widget looks like and tells you how big it is. The main app listings can be customized however you wish, but I was disappointed to see one of the menu screen tabs (All, Favorites, Downloads, etc.) absconded by Verizon Wireless. This Verizon Wireless menu tab cannot be edited, which is lame. That still leaves three tabs for editing, however, and that ranges from alphabetical grids to custom grids to alphabetical lists, and so on.
As for performance, I didn't see any problems during my initial set of tests. Screen transitions were swift, apps opened quickly, and there were no stutters, crashes, or lags.
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