Summary:
The Good:
- Screen in daylight, dark, and in-between is the best I've seen overall including my wife's iPhone4.
- Graphics performance is really fantastic and notably faster than the Droidinc.
- Great size and weight in my meaty paws and in my wife's smaller hands.
The Bad:
- A bit too much junkware that can't be removed w/o root.
- Strange episodes of menu and program lag are quite frequent with few identifiable patterns for reporting upstream.
- Basically no accessories at launch.
The Ugly:
- TouchWiz is not as nice as Sense and while I welcome the less invasive presence what is there is BUGGY AS HELL. (The biggest problem being the Mail client, more on that below.)
---
Let me get the ugly out of the way. The TouchWiz mail client is at best annoying and useless and at worst dangerous to your email. I've tried it with POP and IMAP with and without SSL/TLS and it just doesn't work well. Even deleting email is inconsistent at best. Not nearly as intuitive as any other email client I've used. And seems to stop working for no reason requiring you setup your account again to resume use. Under IMAP it has wiped multiple folders for no apparent reason and Force Closes consistently when handling double-digits worth of email at once (even trying to delete from Trash).
With that said.. the rest of TouchWiz has bugs but they are all workable. For example, if you remove home screens in a way it doesn't like it may decide not to let you move the remaining ones into an order you prefer. It's temperamental and a few tries eventually decides to work. Another minor big is the alarm... if you set it then delete the alarm before disabling it then it will still decide it needs to go off. Going into manage apps, show all, and deleting application data for it does the trick but seriously?
But let me tell you... the screen is a HUGE win here. It has made reading emails and ebooks incredibly easy on the eyes. The Droidinc had a great screen but it still wore on my eyes after a bit. In the first few Vibrant nights I logged at least three times as many eye-hours with little to no discomfort.
Battery life for me has been better than I expected and better than the Droidinc mAh for mAh. For the first time in my phone ownership life I finally saw the 'works better after the first few charge cycles'... it was like night and day from full charge one to full charge four.
While my area has MUCH better Verizon coverage it is pretty clear where I do get proper Tmo coverage the phone has better call quality, speakerphone quality, and data performance AND stability than the Droidinc. That last bit is important... the three Droidinc owners I knew, myself included, has consistent large file and streaming data problems on the Droidinc. While the Flash lite on the Samsung doesn't work in as many places it seems to work better on the Tmo network with streaming data than the Droidinc. Similarly when downloading large files from the web browser it's more stable and consistently fast in comparison. This was something with the Droidinc I experienced consistently that I did not with other Vzw phones. For some reason it just didn't like larger downloads of longer streams.
In addition while TouchWiz is, I repeat, BUGGY AS HELL.. with the exception of the mail client it appears to not effect stability as much as Sense on the Droidinc. When the TouchWiz lags it comes back fairly quickly. When the Sense decided it did not like an application or usage pattern it frequently did not come back for a minute or more. And sometimes not at all. And with my 'test' suite of sixty four apps it's very VERY clear that overall the Vibrant is more stable than the Droidinc. So the version of the OS plus this TouchWiz did at least that quite right.
Input-wise I'm a little unimpressed with Swype. I used ShapeWriter on the Droidinc and it was much better to me. Simple things like two spaces inserting a period and a readily editable user dictionary. The fact I have to remember the words, typos, etc. that were added to the Swype dictionary just to get them to pop up to remove them... ?!? Seriously? Just give me a separate list I can remove and manage the user dictionary. Also ShapeWriter did much better at choosing the right words and seems to have had a much bigger dictionary. Ultimately I enjoy Swype and will continue to use it but I will miss ShapeWriter. I should say that Samsung and Swype are usable in every application I tried. Swype beta on the Droidinc and ShapeWriter on the Droidinc had problems in some terminal emulation and SSH apps. Honestly is Swype would get the two-spaces for a period and the user dictionary editor resolved it would be just fine.
The TouchWiz and Tmo notification bar are a welcome improvement over the Droidinc. First of all notifications of some apps works better and more consistently. Secondly having access to certain power on/off bits (e.g. WiFi and GPS) saves home screen space for me.
I am not having quite the number of problems with the GPS accuracy other people have reported and posted fixes for. It was been pretty reliable for me which I can't quite explain because there should be no reason it behaves for me and not others.
While most of this sounds negative I must say that regardless of problems, and with the exception of email, I'm enjoying the regular use and customizations of the Vibrant much more than the Incredible.
So.. in closing. Buy the Vibrant. Find a new email client. Live happily enough ever after. Cheers, -Pk
The Good:
- Screen in daylight, dark, and in-between is the best I've seen overall including my wife's iPhone4.
- Graphics performance is really fantastic and notably faster than the Droidinc.
- Great size and weight in my meaty paws and in my wife's smaller hands.
The Bad:
- A bit too much junkware that can't be removed w/o root.
- Strange episodes of menu and program lag are quite frequent with few identifiable patterns for reporting upstream.
- Basically no accessories at launch.
The Ugly:
- TouchWiz is not as nice as Sense and while I welcome the less invasive presence what is there is BUGGY AS HELL. (The biggest problem being the Mail client, more on that below.)
---
Let me get the ugly out of the way. The TouchWiz mail client is at best annoying and useless and at worst dangerous to your email. I've tried it with POP and IMAP with and without SSL/TLS and it just doesn't work well. Even deleting email is inconsistent at best. Not nearly as intuitive as any other email client I've used. And seems to stop working for no reason requiring you setup your account again to resume use. Under IMAP it has wiped multiple folders for no apparent reason and Force Closes consistently when handling double-digits worth of email at once (even trying to delete from Trash).
With that said.. the rest of TouchWiz has bugs but they are all workable. For example, if you remove home screens in a way it doesn't like it may decide not to let you move the remaining ones into an order you prefer. It's temperamental and a few tries eventually decides to work. Another minor big is the alarm... if you set it then delete the alarm before disabling it then it will still decide it needs to go off. Going into manage apps, show all, and deleting application data for it does the trick but seriously?
But let me tell you... the screen is a HUGE win here. It has made reading emails and ebooks incredibly easy on the eyes. The Droidinc had a great screen but it still wore on my eyes after a bit. In the first few Vibrant nights I logged at least three times as many eye-hours with little to no discomfort.
Battery life for me has been better than I expected and better than the Droidinc mAh for mAh. For the first time in my phone ownership life I finally saw the 'works better after the first few charge cycles'... it was like night and day from full charge one to full charge four.
While my area has MUCH better Verizon coverage it is pretty clear where I do get proper Tmo coverage the phone has better call quality, speakerphone quality, and data performance AND stability than the Droidinc. That last bit is important... the three Droidinc owners I knew, myself included, has consistent large file and streaming data problems on the Droidinc. While the Flash lite on the Samsung doesn't work in as many places it seems to work better on the Tmo network with streaming data than the Droidinc. Similarly when downloading large files from the web browser it's more stable and consistently fast in comparison. This was something with the Droidinc I experienced consistently that I did not with other Vzw phones. For some reason it just didn't like larger downloads of longer streams.
In addition while TouchWiz is, I repeat, BUGGY AS HELL.. with the exception of the mail client it appears to not effect stability as much as Sense on the Droidinc. When the TouchWiz lags it comes back fairly quickly. When the Sense decided it did not like an application or usage pattern it frequently did not come back for a minute or more. And sometimes not at all. And with my 'test' suite of sixty four apps it's very VERY clear that overall the Vibrant is more stable than the Droidinc. So the version of the OS plus this TouchWiz did at least that quite right.
Input-wise I'm a little unimpressed with Swype. I used ShapeWriter on the Droidinc and it was much better to me. Simple things like two spaces inserting a period and a readily editable user dictionary. The fact I have to remember the words, typos, etc. that were added to the Swype dictionary just to get them to pop up to remove them... ?!? Seriously? Just give me a separate list I can remove and manage the user dictionary. Also ShapeWriter did much better at choosing the right words and seems to have had a much bigger dictionary. Ultimately I enjoy Swype and will continue to use it but I will miss ShapeWriter. I should say that Samsung and Swype are usable in every application I tried. Swype beta on the Droidinc and ShapeWriter on the Droidinc had problems in some terminal emulation and SSH apps. Honestly is Swype would get the two-spaces for a period and the user dictionary editor resolved it would be just fine.
The TouchWiz and Tmo notification bar are a welcome improvement over the Droidinc. First of all notifications of some apps works better and more consistently. Secondly having access to certain power on/off bits (e.g. WiFi and GPS) saves home screen space for me.
I am not having quite the number of problems with the GPS accuracy other people have reported and posted fixes for. It was been pretty reliable for me which I can't quite explain because there should be no reason it behaves for me and not others.
While most of this sounds negative I must say that regardless of problems, and with the exception of email, I'm enjoying the regular use and customizations of the Vibrant much more than the Incredible.
So.. in closing. Buy the Vibrant. Find a new email client. Live happily enough ever after. Cheers, -Pk