Royal Review: Droid Incredible Lives Up To Its Name

Allow me to get the FTC formalities out of the way:

This post was written as a review of my experience with the new HTC Droid Incredible.  Verizon Wireless and Kyle Communications provided a phone for my personal use for a couple of weeks.  No other monies were exchanged and no review or editing of this post were done by Kyle Communications, Verizon Wireless, or any other PR companies.  I always give you my honest opinions in any review post, that’s a Royal Guarantee.

Farewell friend. I have loved thee well.

I believe I mentioned that for the last 2.5 weeks I’ve had a new love.  Lady Michelle and Sir Ted of Verizon, and the fine folks at Kyle Communications (Holla Sir James and Lady Kyle) have lent me a Droid Incredible to test out.  This week my little incredible friend returns from whence it came and I wanted to share some of my favorite features and thoughts with you, Money Saving Lords and Ladies.  And in the process I’ll attempt to answer the age old question – can an expensive phone save you money in the long run?

The Incredible definitely lives up to its name and features everything from a built in GPS to an 8 mega pixel camera that also takes video.  It’s very user friendly.  My current phone is older than the hills and I found myself easily able to learn the navigation system of the Droid Incredible by HTC which features 7 customizable screens that you can easily move back and forth from with the flick of your fingers.  You won’t need a Ph D course to learn how to operate it and in no time at all you can share pictures, video, Facebook and Twitter updates.  Plus the Marketplace for the Droid features literally 1000s of FREE applications (aw for a place that speaks my language).  I’ll share some of my favorites tomorrow but there’s an app for anything you can imagine – many of which are free and several which can save you money, too.  Plus you can check your e-mail (multiple accounts if you’re a geek like me), sync your calendars, load music you already own onto the Incredible (it has a headphone jack and also a decent speaker of its own), check the weather and of course use it to actually make calls as well.

And while talk of GB and GHz usually make my brain spin, just know that this badboy is supa-fast.  No waiting while it grinds away with the refresh circle of death.  Select something and it snaps right to it.  Plus it has WiFi too – allowing you to connect your laptop to it to use the connection – which is completely awesome.  And the touch screen QWERTY keyboard can be accessed horizontally or vertically and has both voice recognition (which is amazingly accurate) as well as that little feature where it automatically guesses what word you’re typing (get out of my brain computer!).

I had several questions from Money Saving Lords and Ladies like yourself on pricing plans and the differences with Blackberry.  From what I can understand, the data plan is just the same as any other smart phone/data package.  So it’s $29.99 on top of what you pay for your voice plan (as little as $39.99 if you don’t talk on the phone often).  And when you consider that you often have to pay an additional fee to get GPS on your Blackberry I do think you save in the long run, comparatively.

So can buying a more expensive phone really save you money?  Maybe.  Especially if you opt out from purchasing all of the other “toys” in life.  If you plan on using this as your primary digital camera, your GPS, your mp3 player, etc. I would say yes.  One device simplifies your life and saves you the cost of buying multiple gadgets.  I’m honestly wondering why you would need anything else.  And recently they were running a B1G1 Droid promo (not sure if that’s over now though) and in that instance I would definitely say it would be worth the extra bucks.  If your job necessitates a data plan, then the extra dollars there would be by all means worth the cost as well.  At this point in time while it was amazingly beneficial to have an internet connected phone for me, I’m not sure we can afford to pony up the extra bucks per month for the plan.  The King of Free’s phone plan is covered by his work and he definitely needs the internet connectivity so more than likely he’ll lean this direction the next time he’s due to renew.

Tomorrow, I’ll share my top 10 FREE Applications that will be worth the download if you have a Droid. They’ll save you money, get you “Buff on a Budget,” keep you organized, focus your time, inspire you, and more.

Simply incredible.  I’ll miss you, my little friend.  If you have specific questions, feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment below!