HTC Droid Incredible review roundup

The HTC Droid Incredible is in high demand – so much so that Verizon has delayed orders for one week to keep up with consumer demand. What's so great about the Droid Incredible? Review scores say it's worth taking a look under the hood.

Well, you've got to hand it to the folks over at Verizon – they sure know how to stir up a king-sized media frenzy. Late last year, if you remember, Verizon spent months preparing for the launch of the Motorola Droid, a sleek, black smart phone which was advertised as the ultimate iPhone killer. (Droid sales were pretty strong, although perhaps not as strong as Verizon would have liked.)

Now, Verizon is rolling out its top-rated Droid Incredible, and demand is so high that Verizon is pushing back some orders until mid-May. On Friday, Verizon promised on its website that it could deliver the Incredible, which is manufactured by the Taiwan company HTC, to consumers by May 7. But as of Monday morning, Verizon had edged back its estimated delivery date to May 14, apparently due to high consumer demand.

Makes sense. Even by the hyperbolic standards of the blogosphere, the HTC Droid Incredible has been highly rated.

"Let's just put this out there: the Droid Incredible is the best Android device that you can purchase in America right now," Engadget's Joshua Topolsky wrote in April. "It's better than the Droid, better than the Nexus One, and certainly beats the pants off of any previous generation handsets like the Eris, myTouch, or Cliq. It's not just a very, very good Android phone (though it is); it's also an excellent smartphone no matter how you cut it."

At infoSync World, Mike Perlman went one step further. "Overall, the HTC Droid Incredible oozed with beauty and functionality," Perlman wrote, "proving to be the definitive Swiss Army Knife of the current smartphone brigade." Perlman praised the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the 3.7-inch display, and the design of the handset itself, which is 0.7 mm thinner than the Apple iPhone 3GS.

The reviewers at Phone Scoop say "message-making tasks are accomplished with ease," and said the phone makes it easy for users to organize data. "Perhaps the only niggle that might keep some at bay is the lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard. If you don't mind typing on glass, the Incredible is the best device Verizon offers," Phone Scoop concludes.

We'll save the last word for Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post.

"In a quick evaluation, the Incredible showed itself to be one of the fastest, most responsive smartphones I've seen," Pegoraro wrote. "With multiple applications open, it zipped from screen to screen without bogging down or pausing. Older Android devices can stumble when multitasking, and the iPhone, for now, doesn't let add-on programs multitask at all."

[Editor's note: The original version of this story said the Incredible was "significantly slimmer than the Apple iPhone." It's 0.7 mm thinner.]