LAS VEGAS—Is HTC becoming the Kickstand Company? I spent some time with the HTC Thunderbolt, Verizon Wireless's new 4G LTE phone today, and the smartphone firm seems to be doing quite a business in kickstands.
Let me explain: when you have a smartphone with a 4.3-inch, 800x480 screen, you tend to want to watch video on it. But propping up most smartphones is tricky, because they're slippery. Enter the kickstand. Now available on three HTC phones – the HD7 for T-Mobile, the EVO for Sprint and the Thunderbolt for Verizon – it lets you prop up the phone to watch videos without trouble.
I'm focused on the kickstand because with Verizon dropping four similar LTE smartphones at once, you have to look to the little things to differentiate them. The Thunderbolt is a big, slab-style phone, just like Verizon's Motorola, LG and Samsung phones. It has a 1Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which falls well short of the dual-core NVIDIA monster in the Motorola Droid Bionic 4G. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back, and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front for video chat. The screen is a TFT LCD, not a fancy new technology like Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus. The phone comes with a 32GB MicroSD card for storage, and like all of Verizon's new LTE phones, it has Skype video chat on board.
But the HTC has some elegant finishing touches that made some of its competitors look a little clunky. For one thing, it feels a little sleeker. The Samsung 4G phone's slightly pointy bottom seems a bit clunky compared to HTC's smooth gray slab, a form they've refined in several phones up until now. Another neat touch: behind the kickstand there's an extra-loud speaker for a big entertainment experience.
HTC Sense is also a better-looking Android skin than Samsung's TouchWiz, and doesn't have a history of dragging performance down like Motorola's MotoBlur. Sense has great-looking widgets, terrific social networking integration and a gussied-up email app; its visual finish is part of why HTC's myTouch 4G for T-Mobile is my single favorite Android phone.
I did some quick speed tests on the Thunderbolt and got decent, but not extraordinary Web and app speeds. But a Verizon rep I spoke to said my Thunderbolt was a pre-production device whose software wasn't quite fully baked, so I'm not making assumptions about performance yet.
Verizon and HTC didn't announce a release date or price for the Thunderbolt.