The HTC Evo Smartphone

I carry around two cell phones, one my personal phone and one my business phone (the IRS should be happy-and I got to use this fact as an example just recently in an examination context).  As long as I’m going to have two, I have them on different carriers, presuming that one of them will always be available.  My personal phone is the Motorola Droid which I had previously reviewed last November when it came out.

I’m not a fan of AT&T’s wireless service (when last I had them my reception was horrid almost everywhere I needed to use it here in Phoenix) and since I have both an iPad and an iPod Touch I haven’t felt the need for an iPhone.  My business phone previously was a Blackberry Curve on Sprint (the company that won out when I fled AT&T years ago).

I’ve decided after the Droid that I really preferred Android to the Blackberry systems, so I decided when the HTC Evo came out to upgrade to that on Sprint.  After waiting a few weeks to get one, I received my Evo last week.

As a phone the Evo has worked well aside from battery life issues (which I’ll discuss later).  I’ve had no problem holding onto calls on the phone, and the sound has been clear.  The size of the phone makes it a bit heftier than some other phones, but the earpiece speaker is large enough to make it easy to position.  In many recent phones finding the right place to position the earpiece takes work, as it is often now a small dot barely visible on a black faceplate.

The display is, for now, the largest one generally available on a cell phone, though it does have a lower resolution than the new iPhone4.  Still, the display was crisp and even in bright sunlight the LCD display remained remarkably readable.  It was much better than my Motorola Droid in such conditions, and on a par with the iPad and my iPod Touch (which has the older iPhone style screen).

The larger screen makes it much easier to touch type on this device than on either the Droid or the iPod Touch/iPhone.  The phone’s software also adds words to the dictionary (and tells you it is doing so), improving its predictive algorithms over time.  I found that I could type as fast or slightly faster than I did on the Blackberry with a physical keyboard, and the software’s method for guessing what words you might be getting ready to type can save a lot of time.  Unlike iOS (the new name for the iPhone’s operating system), Android gives you not only a “best guess” at the word you are likely typing but also puts other reasonable choices on the screen (including what you actually typed–for the iPhone you have to hit a ridiculously small “x” to tell it to not swap its suggestion for the word you really want).

I was wondering how Google would react to having two phones tied to the same GMail account, but that proved to be no issue whatsoever.  The Evo synced up immediately to both my personal Gmail account and our firm’s Gmail Apps hosted mail server.  Google also remembered all the applications I had purchased on the Droid, and the Google App Store showed those apps as “Purchased” and available for download.

The phone will sync mail, calendar and contacts with Google or with an Exchange server.  The mail system will also support IMAP and POP access to mail.  The contacts system can also retrieve contacts from a user’s Facebook account.

The Evo boasts a 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor, and that extra speed showed.  The system is much snappier than the same system on the Droid-and the Droid was no slouch in the speed department.  The extra power was especially noticable in the Google Gesture application (a program that allows the user to use his/her finger to write a search on the phone) where the search results came up almost instantly, compared to a noticeable lag on the Motorola Droid.

While AT&T has now announced that new iPhone customers will now have to live with data caps on their service, Sprint (like Verizon) continues to offer unlimited data on smart phones (at least for now).  As well, the Evo can be used as a Wifi hotspot, sharing its connection with up to eight other devices.  While that will cost an additional $29.95 a month, the data here is also unlimited.  Verizon will be selling, beginning in July, the Droid X which boasts the same hotspot option, but there the usage on the hotspot is capped at 2 GB per month (phone data remains unlimited).  My Verizon Mifi, which also operates as a Wifi hotspot, also has a cap, but it is set at 5 GB.

But there is a downside here-Sprint requires all Evo owners to pay a $10 extra charge for month for 4G service, despite the fact that right now most of the country (including Phoenix) lacks 4G coverage.  The closest 4G location to Phoenix is Las Vegas, and the cities where Sprint has the service now is a rather surprising list, missing most large cities.  What this really means is that, for now, the $10 charge really is the price of admission for an unlimited data cap.  Sprint also sells the Mifi, and its data plan for that 3G device is, like the Verizon one, capped at 5GB per month.

The phone is loaded with Android 2.1, the same version that is now on my Droid.  But as an HTC phone, it comes with HTC’s Sense user interface preinstalled on top of Android.  The Sense UI is found in virtually all higher end HTC phones today, including those build on the Windows Mobile operating system.  The most recognizable feature is the large digital clock/weather widget that covers the top half of the main screen, but Sense includes a number of other HTC specific applications and widgets.

For instance, you get an HTC specific mail application rather than the stock Android mail application.  The HTC version looks more polished, but it does work differently.  HTC offers up a much nicer calendar widget than does the stock Android installation, allowing you to view a number of upcoming appointments in its Agenda View.  The system also allows you to save specific screen setups (icons, widgets, folders, etc.) as “Scenes” so you can different desktops for different situations.  You switch between them by using an option that pops up when you hit the menu button at the home screen.

The Sense UI adds a bit of polish to vanilla Android, but some of the applications seem to have issues with putting some strain on the system’s battery by polling quite often.  That seems especially true of the system’s Facebook application.  With my phone an attempt to make a change to that caused errors in trying to sync contacts with Google.  In an attempt to fix that error, the phone would retry immediately after each failure, creating a runaway sync process that would exhaust the battery in a very short time.  Telling the phone to delete its contact database and resync eventually solved the problem.

Battery life, even without runaway processes, is the big problem for the Evo, especially if you leave all the radios turned on.  For now this is a phone where users should be prepared to read up on battery conservation solutions, especially if the user will be away from power outlets for much of a day.  Otherwise a user may find the battery dying before the day ends.

What a user does has a major impact on the battery life.  Making heavy use of data services will drain the battery as the phone needs to access either the 3G radio or the Wifi one.  Using the phone as a hotspot is a quick way to drain a battery, as both radios are used.  As a practical matter the Evo as hotspot works best if you can plug the Evo in.  For truly portable use for any extended period the Mifi, which can run for about 4 hours of continuous hotspot use, is a much better deal.

Another battery killer involves making heavy use of the GPS function of the phone.  In such cases users report that even with the phone plugged in with a car charger the battery level is drained-a fact to remember if you plan to rely on the GPS function of the phone.  That said, the phone offers two different GPS systems.  It is bundled both with the Sprint Navigation program and the Google Navigation program that comes standard with Android 2.x.  I found both very useful, and the large screen of the phone puts on a par with many dedicated GPS devices.

For general use, I’d recommend turning off all radios that aren’t currently needed.  Widgets can be installed that give immediate access to the radios, so that a user can quickly turn on/off GPS, Wifi, the Hotspot feature or even access to the data network.  With judicious use of the radio controls I’ve found I can get the phone through a full day without a charge.  But I have to worry about battery charge with this phone a lot more than with my Droid, and even more so when compared to the Blackberry Curve it replaced.

Reports indicate that HTC is readying a firmware update to the phone to be released soon that will address some of the issues with the Facebook application and battery life.  As well, Android 2.2 (known as Froyo) is reported to include code to optimize battery life that would be especially welcome on the Evo.

What are my final thoughts?  At this point I find the pluses of the Evo outweigh the minuses when compared to the Blackberry it replaced.  The larger screen makes it much more usable for email, and the ability to use it as a wifi hotspot is especially useful to me when I travel, since I can use it without worrying about the data caps I have to worry about on the Mifi.  It also unifies both of my phones on Android

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