HTC EVO 4G

Well, after whining on here that I could not decide whether to buy the new iPhone 4 and renew my AT&T contract or go to Sprint for the new EVO I took the advice of fellow forum members and purchased an HTC EVO 4G from Sprint. People suggested I buy it and try it for 30 days and return it if I was not happy. If I was happy I could cancel my AT&T contract at that time.

After four days I am going to be returning the EVO 4G on monday and ordering the iPhone 4 on tuesday.

Do not get me wrong, the EVO4G is an amazing phone and my review of it in the EVO review section will be a glowing one. Although I do have a few minor physical build issues with the phone, the problems I have with it are mostly carrier related.

The physical issues I have with the phone are simple. One, I prefer a glass face. I do not care if people want to say the EVO has a glass face but it just has a plastic coating. That still scratches like plastic. In fact, the display at our Sprint store by my house has a nasty scratch on it. Two, the back panel is a bit flimsy when you remove it. I could easily see me damaging it with my ham fisted tendencies. Third, I do not like rear speakers. Although I will say this one did a pretty good job...but it did get muffles a bit if I sat it on a soft surface face up. Finally, the rear camera sticks out a bit too far. The phone will not lie flat. As you can see, these are all minor issues. I did have one major issue with battery life while using 4G. I left home one morning and took the train to Seattle and back. I browsed the web a short while at the train station, checked some info a couple of times while in Seattle, and then browsed the web a few minutes at the train station before returning home. After only about 2-2.5 hours max of usage my battery was dead. That seems a bit extreme...but I was warned 4G was power hungry.

The place it really fell down was with the carrier service. I am in a 4G market but could not get 4G inside my home. I could get it in my back yard, but not inside the house. When I was receiving 4G service the phone did very well, but not as well as I feel it should have. I did speed checks and even though the EVO claimed to be receiving data at rates of speed 2-3x the speed my iPhone 3GS it did not seem to actually work much faster. My iPhone 3GS was averaging .6-.8 and the EVO was averaging 1.7-2.1 when outside. Still, web pages seemed to load at almost the same speeds. The EVO did always finish first by a half second to a second but that is really not the big difference I was hoping for when I bought the phone. Another problem was dropped calles. I have dropped at least a half dozen calls in the past two days. I am one of the few people that has never had that issue with my current AT&T service.

So, even though I love the HTC EVO 4G I will be sticking with the iPhone for now. It is kind of a shame too. I really fell in love with the huge screen on the EVO. Luckily I have the unlimited data plan with AT&T. I feel I will probably be less happy about this decision once the EVO gets Android 2.2 and has an actual flash player. If Hulu works on it I might end up regretting my decision. Hopefully the new Netflix iphone app will dull the pain of the decision a bit.