Over a week with the HTC EVO 4G

I decided to upgrade a line on my family plan to the EVO. My mother does not care what she uses so I used her upgrade and then added the EVO on my line. The activation of my phone took about 15 minutes, which was not too bad. I had to wait 45 minutes at Radioshack because the other 4 people were waiting several hours for their phones to be activated. It was chaos, but I am very glad it activated via the website. 199 out the door, I have to love Delaware for the no tax.

After 2 phone calls I received a nice tech rep who got the EVO on my line and re-activated my mom's VE20. I think the $10 charge is stupid, but since I get such a good deal (15% off, $10 recurring credit) I cannot begrudge Sprint too much.

The phone: I really like it. I am surprised it does not seem too large, but it really fits well in my hand. The sound quality is excellent, probably the best I've used on Sprint. It's almost as good as my old Motorola v400 back on Cingular. So, as a phone, the EVO is great. Web browsing and other smartphone tasks are pretty good. I think Palm's WebOS is much more intuitive than Android, but I do like the app Market. The camera is very good as is the camcorder. The biggest issue I've seen is the complaints about battery life. It really isn't bad. A typical day lasts 8am off the charger to 6pm when I get home and I usually have some juice left. That is usually at least an hour or 2 of web browsing and 20 minutes of calls, and most likely some music listening. I get bored when I am out in the field, so it gets a decent amount of use. No worse than the Pre or other CDMA smartphones sans Blackberries. I tend to charge it in my work truck if I am going to grad school at night, just in case I need more juice.

4G is OK. I think Sprint is completely going the wrong 4G route. I routinely lose 4G along the highway (I-95) and inside almost every building in Philadelphia. The network is not fully active in Wilmington, DE so I can have signal in one spot, move 4 feet and completely lose it. I hope that is fixed when it launches. 4G can be fast (4mbps) but also slower than 3G. At Trader Joes on Saturday I was pulling 60 kbps down and 18 up. 3G in the same spot was 1.2mbps up/down. WiMax just isn't the vehicle for 4G IMO. The frequencies are just killing it. Plus the whole fact, I can be standing under a Sprint tower and have no WiMax since Clear/Comcast/Sprint are building out a completely new network...it's very weird to see so many Sprint co-located towers w/o 4G. When 4G works, it's pretty decent. I watched a movie via Netflix on my MacBook at home while tethered just because I could. Of course, when I actually want to to tether, chances are there will be no 4G around. I understand 4G, whether LTE or WIMax is a completely new network...it would be nice if the coverage pattern was similar to the current CDMA network. While I still think Verizon stinks around here (I still have to use them for work), I do think their 4G rollout will be more smooth than this. Overall, I leave 4G off unless I know I am going to have solid coverage and I'll need the speed. 3G just blazes on the Android webkit browser as it is.