PC World — The best of the Droids on Verizon (VZ), the Droid Incredible ($200 with a two-year contract from Verizon) impresses with its speedy user interface, gorgeous AMOLED display and fun Sense user interface. Other than some minor design qualms, this smartphone truly lives up to its name.

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Design-wise, the Droid Incredible appears fairly similar to the Nexus One, but it is essentially a CDMA version of the HTC Desire, which launched last February in Barcelona, Spain. The Droid Incredible has an 8-megapixel camera (as opposed to the Nexus One and Desire's 5-megapixel shooters). The Droid Incredible also has a strange rubberdized "topographic" battery cover, which I could have done without. While the Incredible is lighter, it doesn't feel as solid as the Nexus One.

While the Nexus One has four touch keys, the Droid Incredible has four physical hardware keys running along the bottom (Home, Menu, Back, Search). I actually prefer the Nexus One's touch keys, though, as it gives the phone a more streamlined look.

Another difference from the Nexus One is that the Droid Incredible has an optical mouse as opposed to a trackball. Like RIM BlackBerrys, HTC seems to be making a shift from trackball to optical (both the HTC Desire and Legend sport an optical mouse).

The Droid Incredible runs Android 2.1 with the revamped Sense interface, which offers some useful new functions for easy navigation. For more information about Android 2.1's features, check out our review of the Google Nexus One.

My favorite new Sense UI feature is Leap, which essentially is an elegant way of handling multitasking (a bit reminiscent of Palm's webOS deck of cards visualization). Pinch anywhere on the homescreen, and you'll jump to seven thumbnail versions of your open pages. From there, you can go to any of those open applications or close out of one. Thanks to the Droid Incredible's speedy 1GHz Snapdragon processor, this feature works extremely well, too.

Friend Stream, HTC's social network aggregator, allows you to view your friends' status updates, shared links, and pictures all in one seamless view. Supported social networks include Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and others. I find these social network feeds a bit annoying (do I really need to see everybody's Tweets and Facebook status updates all mixed up together?), but I suppose if you're an avid social networker seeing all of these updates in one place is useful.

One feature I found especially cool: You can tap and drag to highlight a block of text and either look up a word in a dictionary or translate it via Google (GOOG) Translate.

Check back soon for a more in-depth look at the HTC Droid Incredible's multimedia features and to see how its 8-megapixel camera performed in our hands-on tests.