HTC Incredible S stars in thoroughly plausible hands-on photos

Remember the HTC Incredible? No? Well, that's probably because it never came out in the UK. Nevertheless, the follow-up, the Incredible S, will be slamming screen-first into the white cliffs of Dover in March.

You can read our full preview of the Incredible S for all the details, but, as the phone has an interesting industrial design and generally looks bleedin' gorgeous, we figured we'd send some juicy hands-on photos your way too.

The Incredible S doesn't have any particularly new or different features. There's no 3D, no dedicated Facebook button, and no slide-out PlayStation controls, but that doesn't mean we're not excited. HTC now has a reputation for making excellent handsets, and we're hoping the Incredible S will prove to be a solid all-rounder.

There's an 8-megapixel camera with flash stuck on the back of the phone. That's decent, but it's by no means the highest-spec phone camera we've ever seen.

The 4-inch display looks bright and beautiful. The colourful HTC Sense wallpapers burn so bright that we're still seeing rainbows when we close our eyes. But the Desire HD has a bigger screen.

The Incredible S runs on a single-core, 1GHz processor, which is fast, but not as fast as the dual-core processor in phones like the Samsung Galaxy S 2 or Motorola Atrix. Nevertheless, the interface moved quickly and smoothly during our hands-on test, so we doubt the Incredible S will struggle to run apps or games.

One brilliant little feature is that the touch-sensitive buttons below the screen switch orientation if you turn the phone on its side -- check out the photos above for pictures of this in action. It's a great feature and shows HTC has thought carefully about the phone's design. 

The Incredible S will run on Android 2.2 Froyo at launch. That's a version behind the latest iteration of Android, 2.3 Gingerbread, which is soon to be overtaken itself by 2.4 Gingerbread, packing some minor bug fixes. There's nothing wrong with Android 2.2 -- in fact, the new features in Android 2.3 aren't all that exciting. But it's the principle of the thing -- people want the latest version of Android.

On the plus side, HTC tell us that the Incredible S will get an update to Android 2.3 around April, a month after it hits the UK. There's been no word on pricing yet, but we'll let you know as soon as we do.