We already know one phone that comes as close to the iPhone as possible accept for the apps bit and that is the Motorola Milestone. Originally promoted as the Droid by Verizon in US, it was the first device to run the Android 2.x OS and till date is the best alternative in the smartphone market for the iPhone 3GS.
Verizon is now gearing up to push out the HTC Incredible which has already managed to hype itself enough to be called an iPhone killer. The Droid and Incredible both run the OS 2.1 currently but HTC sense UI sets Incredible apart from the Droid. Though it loses the physical QWERTY advantage over the iPhone, Incredible has a larger screen, much better camera and a faster processor. The Incredible features an 3.7″ OLED display, with 480×800 resolution 1GHz snapdragon processor & 8 Megapixel camera; each of these are better than the Apple iPhone 3GS which has a 3.5″ LCD, 600Mhz processor and a 3MP camera. Apple has little to challenge the Incredible on the hardware front. However the difference maker can only be the iPhone OS.
The Incredible goes on sale just before month end i.e. 29th April and at the same time HTC and Apple are also battling it out in the court over their patent disputes. It would be interesting to see how it fares against the iPhone 3GS but more importantly how well does it hold against the upcoming iPhone 4th gen. If the decision is to be made today the Incredible surely beats the iPhone 3GS with a way way superior hardware. However the only thing missing perhaps is the App Store magic (apart from a little concern I have with the Sense UI, not sure how well it will gel, can only comment once we go hands on.)
Spec fight HTC Droid Incredible vs the iPhone 3GS
| Feature | iPhone 3GS | Droid Incredible |
| Network | 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 3G HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100 |
Dual-band (800 and 1900MHz) CDMA2000 1xRTT/1xEVDO/1xEVDO rev. A and IS-95A/B |
| OS | iPhone OS 3.0 | OS: Android 2.1 Google Experience Device |
| Display | TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors 320 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches |
3.7? 480×800 (capacitive) WVGA OLED Touch screen |
| Camera | 3.15 MP / Autofocus 30 fps Video recodring with audio |
8MP camera w/auto–focus + video recording (with audio) |
| EDGE | HSDPA suppored 7.2 Mbps | 1.8 Mbps uplink / 3.1 Mbps downlink |
| Internet Browser | Mobile Safari Full HTML without Flash support |
Android Browser |
| Messaging | SMS (threaded view), MMS, Emails |
SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM |
| FM | no | FM Radio with RDS |
| Processor | 600 MHz CPU | 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor |
| Battery | Unknown | Standby time quotes 146hours |
| Colours | White and Black | |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth AD2P (headset support only) Bluetooth P2P games WiFi, AGPS |
Bluetooth AD2P WiFi GPS |
| Memory | 256MB RAM 16 GB/ 32 GB storage |
512MB RAM 8GB internal memory MicroSD expansion |
| Weight | 135gms | 130 gms |
| Others |
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