CES 2011 LIVE: HTC Thunderbolt Hands-On & Pictures

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We thought the HTC Thunderbolt would be the first 4G phone announced for Verizon. The Motorola Droid Bionic beat it just a bit by a few days, but don’t let that take away any of the ‘thunder’ of the Thunderbolt. At the Verizon booth here at CES, I got my hands on the phone and it could be my most favorite Verizon 4G phone announced at the show this year.

I found the phone has the same ample 4.3-inch screen size as the other 4G LTE phones announced this year. It’s also likely the lightest of the four phones announced, and really feels thin, too. In fact, I liked the phone and found it had a nice, well-constructed feel to it, something that I didn’t think the earlier HTC EVO 4G had (the phone that it’s believed the Thunderbolt was based on).

That 4.3-inch screen is powered by the 1GHz Snapdragon processor, likely the same that’s in the EVO 4G. And, I found that it was powerful, quick and responsive. The phone is running on Android 2.2 and when I asked about an upgrade to Android 2.3, I was told to “talk to HTC” (who wasn’t exhibiting at CES).

The Verizon rep told me that he’d been using the Thunderbolt and (in it’s pre-release state), he found that he got about a “full day’s” worth of  usage, so I’m assuming it’s about 8 hours.

Click hands on images below for full size:

Interested in 4G speeds? Before the network is loaded up, I’ve seen people report about 22Mb/s on Verizon LTE cards. And, the Verizon rep told me at the booth that he’s seen speeds up to 30Mb/s on the LTE network! So, it’s certainly fast, but don’t expect to see these speeds once Verizon’s customers start switching to 4G devices en masse. Verizon does have 92 million customers – so they’ll need all the speed and capacity they can for all those customers.

Want to catch up with more of our CES 2011 Hand On postings? You can see an index of all our CES 2011 Hand On posts – each complete with their own gallery – here.