HTC Evo 4G Sprint Review

Americas first 4G phone. The phone with the largest screen available. A kickstand!? Sprint and HTC really went all out on this bad boy. This is my first android phone, and after having just about every other mobile phone OS from WinMo 6.1 to Blackberry OS to WebOS, I can give a pretty varied view of this OS. I moved away from WinMo because it was an outdated beast. No support for capacitive screens or multi-touch, expensive apps, sub-part hardware. My stint with webOS was promising, but ended in failure. This following are my impressions of Android and the Evo 4G after about a week.

Hardware:
This phone is huge, there is no question. A 4.3 inch capacitive LCD (not AMOLED) is clearly the biggest phone on the market. Coming from a much smaller blackberry with lower resolution, this screen is beautiful. Pictures are crisp, text is very readable, and there is ample room to play around with.
The phone is powered by a Snapdragon 1 Ghz processor, and yes, its fast! The phone rarely slows down, seeming only doing so to install an app. I am having a hard time thinking of a situation where I had to wait for the phone to do anything. Home screens swipe by easily with no hesitation. On the pre, if you overran the app listing, the page would go over the screen, and slowly bounce back into position, it was very annoying. On the Evo, its smooth and almost instant, no waiting for the page to align itself.
The speaker is also quite loud, but not as loud as my blackberry tour was. Still good enough though.
The 4 buttons on the bottom of the phone are capacitive, and not physical. When I want to press them, I have no issues. Sometimes I will graze one and accidentally hit it, but they work quite well.
The camera. 8MP and 720p video recording. Pictures from the 8MP camera are quite good, there is no question. There is very little shutter lag when taking pictures, much like the Palm Pre. Not much to say about this one, the images speak for them self. The video portion of the camera is a little weaker. Although it records at 720p, there is noticeable compression in the video. Still, for a phone, not to shabby. One problem, there is no setting to turn on the double LED flash for video recording, you have to do that with a separate program. Another note ont he double LED flash. Although there are 2 LEDs for the flash, I still think the single flash on the Blackberry Tour was brighter, MUCH brighter. That thing is blinding.
On the bottom of the phone, there is a micro USB port, as well as a micro HDMI port. I have not been able to try this out, as I can't even find a Micro Type D HDMI cable to buy. I had a video out feature on my HTC Touch Pro, but also never used it.
Battery life. This is not the phones strong point. Most people thought that the 4.3 inch screen would be have a huge impact on the phones battery life, but that does not seem to be the case. There is something else happening here, and I cannot figure it out. There are promising fixes in the works, and one that I tried yesterday seems to be working. I need more time to figure this out, as well as the 1750 mAh battery that is in the mail right now. More on this at a later date.

Software:
Android OS, wow! This OS blows away every other phone OS i have used in most aspect. I'l start with apps.
When I had a windows mobile phone, that was my first glimpse at apps for a phone. Things have changed since then, a lot. Most people reading this have probably read my previous post about apps on the blackberry OS, but I will sum it up. There are a TON of free apps on Anrdoid, and prices for paid apps are modest. I still don't understand why apps on BB cost sometimes 5x of their Android ports. The app store on Android is very fast, downloads take seconds, as do installs. There is almost no waiting to either install or delete an app. I'm looking at you, blackberry. Also, there is almost never a need to restart the phone, which I love. And when I do need to reboot, it does not take 14 minutes, ala Blackberry.
All the apps that I have used on WebOS or Blackberry are vastly improved on Android. Google maps is usable now, thanks to the lack of BIS data. Map frames load instantly, and the built in digital compass helps out for directions.
The HTC Evo has is running Sense, which kind of covers stock Android, much like any decent phone running Windows Mobile. Sense runs very smoothly, but is probably on its way out with android 2.2 taking over a lot of its use. I like it though. I have all sorts of widgets running that keep me up to date on the home screen, and also via notifications. This brings me to my next point, notifications.
The evo and android do this pretty well, but not the best; that award still goes to WebOS. When a text comes in, an indicator goes up on the status bar. You then have to lower the bar to reveal what notifications are pending, and then click each to open that corresponding app. This is similar to WebOS, where the notification would go to the bottom of the screen, and you can just tap it to reveal what it is, and swipe it away to clear it. Anyone who has used an iphone knows how intrusive those notifications are, so android beats that hands down.
The software keyboard is actually not too bad. I have never owned a phone without some sort of method for hardware input, and was expecting a lot worse coming from a blackberry with a class leading keyboard. The auto-predict works very well once I added in my phrases such as "eep" and other, uh, non-factory included words. The screen is big enough that I am able to easily type away on the screen. My biggest issue is with the space button, I seem to miss it a lot. Additionally, the stock keyboard has voice to text input, which works remarkably well. I am pretty surprised at how accurate it can be.
The web browser is of course, great. Coming from blackberry, this makes mobile browsing a lot more doable. No more "Requesting....." or long load times. I do not miss BIS. Pages render properly and quickly, even on 3G. Oh, right, I forgot about that whole 4G thing.
How does the phone operate on 4G? Good question! Sprint/Clearwire do not have 4G running in this area, and won't for quite some time imagine. I should be able to test this to a degree when I go home to NY in a few weeks.

I have not had the chance to put this phone through a torture test yet. My conditions for a torture test are to see how fast I can complete calls in a panic situation, like when im at the airport and delta cancels my 5th flight of the week. The Blackberry Tour passed this test with ease, and I will see how the evo stacks up in the near future.

Overall, after a rambling review that I', sure you are already bored of, there are a few things to take away from this. Android is fantastic, and constantly getting better. Fast data is key, and RIM simply does not understand this, and google does, so now I have a google phone. The hardware is top notch, only held back by its questionable and wavering battery life, which hopefully improves. So far, i'm pretty damn happy!

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS27QuFFIgA]YouTube - Evo 4g test[/ame]

 

Yeah, that should be really interesting. Hopefully they have it running partially in the areas I will be. Being near JFK should be a help.

Thank you!

Thank you, too!

Haha, thank you Chris, I try. I've never had a phone with so many features, and I'm sure I forgot to talk about a few of them, but the review was long enough as it is.

There is one thing, that James(Tank) pointed out. The Blackberries have hardware buttons which do different tasks depending on what you are doing. For instance, the mute button on the top right of my tour muted phone calls while in a call, but also muted music when it was being played. The volume rockers on the right side were also used to advance the track if held down. Even though the evo has the volume rocker, they don't provide this crucial function.