It seems longer and wider than the Droid Eris but not as thick or heavy. The protective plastic cover on the face has labels for the buttons - what a great idea! The volume up/down rocker switch looks to be easier to operate than the Eris's, which was somewhat recessed. The back cover isn't ugly but it feels a little flimsy and bendable. The inside plastic is a bright orange, as is the battery. The colors match perfectly when the battery is inserted. The camera lens has a green color down inside it for some reason. The two flash LEDs beside it make it look kind of cool and high tech. The first powerup sequence took about 30 seconds and the battery was at half strength. You have to dial the activation phone number from another phone. It asked for my 10-digit phone number and the last 4 digits of my Social Security number. It asked me to press 1 if my order number was...and read it off correctly. It asked me to press 1 if I agreed to a 2-year contract and a $350 penalty for early withdrawal. It asked me to press 1 if I wanted to activate it now. It gave me instructions for what to dial on the new phone to get it activated. First screen that showed up when I ended the screen saver asked me to select English or Spanish. The next screen said "You need to make a special call to activate your phone service. After pressing Activate, listen to the instructions provided to activate your phone." I pressed the Activate button and it dialed a number (*228) and asked me to press 1 to activate the phone. I did, and the display said programming was in progress. Then the voice said that programming was complete, the call hung up, and the display said the phone would reset in 5 seconds. It restarted/rebooted and I was up and running.
The first screen when starting the phone again asked me to select English or Spanish. The second screen asked if I wanted to see a demo of interactive typing or whatever it is that thinks it knows what you're trying to spell, same setup as the Eris keyboard so I skipped it. The screen saver time seems to be very short on this, and when the screen blacks out I pressed the "Power/Lock" button on top of the phone to get the screen to light up again. The next setup screen asked if I wanted my Internet connection to be "Mobile network or Wi-Fi" or "Wi-Fi only (Don't have a data plan? Choose this one." Now that is cool! Next it detected my home Wi-Fi network and asked if I wanted to connect to it (with the connect box checked by default). I let it connect and it detected 4 wifi sources in range (couldn't get the onscreen keyboard into landscape mode for this step). I like the keyboard setup, same as the Eris, so when you tap a key you see the letter/number displayed in a large window momentarily and the phone vibrates for a fraction of a second to confirm the keystroke. The connection worked fine. The next screen asked for Location Consent to turn on Google's location service. I said okay fine so maybe I could locate the phone if someone stole it. Next it asked if I wanted to set up mail, contacts, and calendar accounts. Choices were Backup Assistant, Google account, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, and Other mail account. I chose Google account and it opened another application that let me set one up or register an existing one. I see that this keyboard has the period to the right of the keyboard and the comma to the left, like the Eris, and also that the comma key has the "@" key as a second function. Next it asked if I wanted to set up social networks - Facebook, Flickr, Twitter. Twitter uses "HTC Peep" so I set that up. No problems there.
That was it for setup. The home screen has a display I didn't see on the Eris that says "Press the Home button or pinch to zoom out to thumbnail view." This is something different. You can either scroll left and right to see the seven individual pages, or hit Home to put thumbnails of all seven pages on one screen. Nice. The trackpad or whatever it's called has a pushbutton in the center of it. It looks like that and the volume up/down rocker and the Power/Lock button are the only three mechanical buttons on the phone (I wondered what would happen to the Eris's trackball after a year or two exposure to cat hair).
I don't know if it's the dry Arizona air, but just by moving the phone around in my hand I accidentally activated the camera, the Android Market application, and the Add to Home screen. I hope that settles down, or I will need to be very careful with moving my hand around on the case of the phone while pressing onscreen buttons.
The phone has the same tiny event notification icons at the very top of the home screen. You can drag down from there to open the Notifications window and see what the icons mean. I had about 8 of them lined up on the Eris one day before I realized I could acknowledge the email messages and "program installation complete" messages and the icons would go away. The weather report on the Home screen says "Mostly cloudy," and when you first "pull down the shade" to see the Home screen after it's been off, a nice animation of drifting clouds goes across the screen once.
The AC plug is a "wall wart" type device, but the USB cable plugs into the top of it rather than the side, so it doesn't come out at a weird angle from your outlet strip.
Anyway, my fingers are tired so I hope that helped whet some appetites and let you know what to expect when you receive your phones in about a week. When you really think about it, that's not very long at all in cosmic terms.
Not sure whether to believe you have the phone or not 
. We are less than a week from our beloved Incredible and thanks to you your sources and countless others of this thread we've been able to make informed decisions about purchasing this phone. So I just want to say thanks to you and everyone else! Also, everyone in the thread that makes this place so great. Hope we can count on everyone to stick around and help the Incredible Forum and community grow into a great resource for Incredible owners! Chow!
