The Sprint HTC EVO 4G Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 28, 2010 6:04 PM ESTThe Basics
The EVO 4G currently ships with Android 2.1, although sometime before the end of the year it should get 2.2. Layered on top of Android is a set of HTC developed apps, widgets and UI modifications called Sense. As a whole HTC’s Sense makes Android a much more polished experience and is generally a positive thing. The downside is that it takes HTC longer to bring Android updates to its phones as it has to not only port the updated Android code but also make sure that Sense works with it as well. I’ve already looked at Sense in my Incredible review and talked about Android in my Nexus One review. What follows here is a brief refresher as well as an update on some things I didn’t touch last time around.
The lock screen is different but no better or worse than what I’ve seen on other Android phones like the Nexus One. Instead of swiping left to unlock, you swipe down. If your phone is locked and you get a call you just swipe down to answer and swipe up to decline.
When locked any incoming text messages appear with a preview at the bottom of the screen. This is in addition to the usual notifications up top which I’m happy to say I’ve finally gotten used to and definitely appreciate above and beyond what Apple does in iOS. I still have a fondness for webOS’ notification system but until we see a resurgence of Palm under HP management I’ll have to count them out of the smartphone wars.
The main home screen has a calendar/weather widget and icons for Messages, People (Contacts), Mail, the Android Market, the Camera and Voicemail. You can add your own icons by hitting the menu button and selecting the Add to Home option.
There are a total of 7 home screens that you can configure on the phone. Three to the left and three to the right of the main screen I just described. The default EVO 4G skin has a page with an MP3 player widget as well as a bunch of Sprint apps, a page with a Bookmarks widget for frequently accessed websites and one more with a Friend Stream widget that combines your Facebook and Twitter updates into a single stream of other peoples’ lives. The other three home screens include a calendar, Google search bar and widgets to turn off things like 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS.
The quick access to turning off 4G and WiFi is pretty nice, although in practice the 4G toggle didn’t get as much use as I thought it would.
The favorites widget automatically populates itself with frequently dialed contacts. If you supply your Facebook login information it will also indicate if your contact has updated their Facebook page. Unfortunately trying to view a Facebook profile from a contact’s info page won’t launch Facebook’s Android app but instead just load the mobile version of Facebook in the browser.
Cloud Integration
Like all other Android devices, the EVO 4G integrates with the cloud very well assuming you actively use a couple of key services: Google apps and Facebook. If you supply your login information to those services (you can also add Flickr and Twitter) pretty much every aspect of your phone will automatically integrate itself into your life before you can even think of the word sync.
Contacts will automatically get pulled from your Google contacts and Facebook friends list. Email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, photos, everything all get integrated onto your phone. If anyone changes their contact information in Facebook it’ll get updated on your phone. If you update a contact in Google the same will happen on your phone. It’s very nice. If you don’t use those services then the EVO works more like a regular phone but without good supplied desktop sync software.
The cloud integration is ridiculously convenient. It’s useful enough that it makes going to most other devices feel ancient. Even if you don’t have your life in the cloud, stepping foot into the Android world is generally enough to make you want to change.
Organization by Person
Once you’re all synced up with the cloud Android truly behaves like a Google product: it just works on organizing data. Here are all of the things you can do when you’re looking at a single contact on the EVO 4G (or any other HTC Sense enabled device):
- View Contact Information including available personal information from Facebook
- View all SMSes exchanged with the contact
- View all emails exchanged with the contact
- View latest Facebook and Flickr updates and albums
- View a log of all calls between you and the contact (you can also clear the call log history)
The functionality itself is above and beyond anything Apple offers, but it gets better. There’s full customization available on anything I mentioned above.
Want to see only the past day worth of Facebook updates for the contact? That’s configurable. Want to see the past 30 days of Facebook updates? You can set that as well, all on a contact by contact basis.
You can also do typical cellphone stuff to each contact. You can opt to send the contact straight to voicemail whenever they call or choose specific ringtones. Linking a contact to their Facebook profile is particularly helpful since we’re vain creatures and tend to share our birthdate with our FB friends. You now have a quick way of figuring out when someone’s birthday is just by pulling up the contacts in your phone.
If this all sounds like stuff you’d never want to deal with, you don’t have to. The EVO 4G still works like a normal smartphone. The flexibility is simply a selling point of Android.
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Mr Perfect - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Ah, ok, that's fair then. Looking forward to the coming reviews.Thanks for the reply,
MP
mikephenix - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Most of the choppyness can be attributed to the 30 fps cap imposed on the OS. Both 2d and 3d framerates are capped at 30 fps on this phone. It's unusual that HTC would cap this device, when the nexus one and incredible do not have this cap in place:http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=6...
AmbroseAthan - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
One thing I feel like you overlooked is the Sprint TV.I own the EVO also and one of the things I have absolutely loved is the Sprint TV, and this is mainly right now for ESPN. Every single World Cup game is streaming live, so if I am for some reason away from the TV, I can watch. Even in only 3 bars of 3G service, it comes through very clean. With the kickstand, I set it up on a kitchen counter and a group of us watched Brazil play (grandpa had commandeered the TV for the US Open). Battery live looks to be in the vicinity of 3.5+ hours of TV.
I admittedly need to explore it more, but there are multiple live stations and several stations of older material.
ale087 - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I do see a degree of choppiness when compared to the iPhone and as you said it can be attributed to the lack of GPU acceleration in the UI... You should, however, mention in your review that there are optimized home replacements like ADW launcher and Launcher Pro that offer very smooth scrolling and better responsiveness, and excellent task manager/killer apps and widgets that help with memory management....Your browsing speed tests puzzle me, however. In real life tests on the same wifi network after clearing all cache, I consistently see the EVO and the Incredible render webpages faster than the iPhone 4 and 3Gs.... Also, the nexus one with the FRF83 froyo renders pages noticeably faster than even the iPad (with flash 10.1 set to on-demand or off), and its Java script performance far excells that of the other handsets and the iPad from what I have seen from other sources....
mongo lloyd - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Looking forward to a Samsung Galaxy S (A.K.A. Captivate, GT-I9000) review. Maybe that'll be the device Anand's searching for.ale087 - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,I remember you previewed the Galaxy S and left us all excited about its release, any chance you've received one to review? The international unlocked version is out and I would really like to see an in-depth hardware review to decide if I want to spend the big bucks for it. It would also be fantastic if you do an iPhone 4 vs. Galaxy S review since they have such similar hardware :D. BTW I think it's great that you're doing phone reviews! nobody else goes as in-depth into the hardware as you do, and it's great to get a better understanding of what's ticking inside of these devices...
Thanks!
Alejandro
spathotan - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Glad I went with the Incredible instead. Had it for about 3 weeks and I love it. Ive tortured it a bit and its passed with flying colors. Was downloading/converting 2 songs and 2 videos off YouTube while playing a 3D game (ZENONIA) all at once with ZERO performance lags. I was quite suprised.juampavalverde - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I will like to see the improvement of this evo4g with android 2.2, i have the feeling that with some time this android phones will just get better (also in battery life). Anyway looks great!Impulses - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
Many of them have already seen a steady improvement thanks to the user community of devs... If you're the sort that doesn't mind tweaking and messing with your device a little bit anyway. Personally I've never been big on any of that w/electronics outside of my PC (I want my phone, DVR, MP3 player, etc. to just "work")... But I've delved into the world of custom Android ROMs and whatnot and it really is quite amazing what some of these guys can accomplish, it certainly puts Google/HTC's stock builds to shame.Sprint has also issued two OTA patches for the EVO already (review was probably written before the 2nd one), the last one corrected some scrolling issues when the phone was not handheld (grounding issue I believe, personally I rarely encountered it even tho I read w/the phone laying on the table a lot) and made some other small improvements to the radio (which in turn should help w/battery).
Frankly I haven't been bothered by any performance issues w/my EVO, but my only real basis for comparison is a 2nd gen (slower) iPod touch so YMMV. Battery life was somewhat disappointing w/the stock ROM but has improved a lot w/custom ROMs and/or some tweaking of the default sync settings. By default it's set to sync several different accounts (FB, Gmail, News, etc. etc.) at different intervals, some as often as 2-3 hours. Anand made no mention of this, I wonder if he looked into that at all when testing...
The last thing I'll mention is that Swype blows any other touch keyboard out of the water, by a longshot... You really have to experience it first-hand to know what all the hype is about. It's still in beta (not hard to find leaked .apk's on the message boards) and I believe they're even gonna try selling it on the iPhone app market eventually (also available for WM).
Regardless, it's a joy to use, 'specially on such a large screen, I can type faster w/one hand and Swype (AND more accurate) than I can with two hands on a Samsung Impression (which has one of the better landscape/slider keyboards amongst feature phones out there). The freedom to try all these things out (w/o waiting for Apple or anyone's approval) is what I really love about Android.
smsmith - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,Thanks for the great review! Your iPhone 3GS sunspider time seems a bit high though. Just now I ran it on my 3GS and got 13771ms.