My first impressions after an hour with the Droid Incredible at the Verizon store:

The HTC Sense UI crushes this phones potential. Very disappointing. Someone must port stock Android 2.1 to this phone.

Unpolished, half baked, inconsistent. Rotating the phone 90 degrees failed to change the screen and keyboard orientation more often than it worked. Very few preferences in the modified basic apps, forcing us to use their poor implementation. Widgets could be seen updating when you returned to them (ie: return to your homescreen after being in an app for 10 minutes and the clock will show the time from 10 minutes ago for an instant before updating to current time; sloppy).

Unintuitive, reduces productivity. More clicks needed to access contacts from phone app. Similar UI elements in different apps are implemented differently. Text auto-completion was so frustrating I dropped the phone in disgust. Search button needed too often - Palm Pre jumps to an item in a list when you start typing its name; requires the Search button with no physical keyboard. I was quickly proficient with Motorola Droid and Palm Pre, but Incredible didn't have that uptake.

Flashy, unnecessary, change for change's sake. Reminiscent of a feature phone - Switching among the new bottom-screen icons would flood the entire screen with an image of that icon. Useless and distracting. Moving home screen icons showed where you could move them too; clutter. Menu icons are all new or renamed; why?

"Widgets on home screens" is not better than solid apps. Emulating the multitasking and card view of the Palm Pre by dominating entire home screens with widgets. But they're less functional than the Google-provided full apps. Contact widget is less efficient than contact shortcuts on the desktop. Calendar widget (large view) is just a less functional view of the actual calendar (small view may be useful). More clutter and flash. Seven-homescreen-view is not live.

Youth-focused. Stock Android 2.0 and 2.1 no-nonsense tools suitable for power users and business use. HTC Sense UI sacrifices that for social networking integration. Years from now, we'll all laugh at this phone when it's hardcoded social networks are deserted like MySpace. Years from now, stock Android will still be viable.

Bad use of optical 4-way navigator. Blackberry is still the champ, where its entire device can be used at maximum efficiency with the trackball. On the Incredible, the optical nav implementation slows you down. Perhaps it's only intended as touch up to fat fingering on the capacitive screen. We need speed sensitive optical nav, just like the velocity scrolling we all expect.


Good things. Browser pinch to zoom, reflowing text, snapping to columns when zooming; but that's all in 2.1. Contacts can show call log just for one contact.


Disclaimer - Even though the phone was just released today, there's a good chance that the in-store model was abused and misconfigured. I'll go back to the store and continue trying to find its usefulness.