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iPhone 3G user who switched (yes friends, yet another iPhone user review)

LazyEngineer

Newbie
Jul 19, 2010
43
5
(composed within 24 hours of ownership)
Overall, I have to say I'm satisfied, but there are things about my iPhone that I'm going to miss....


Phone is hardware release 3, with the latest patches.

On to the phone:
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Battery: the biggest concern I had with this phone was that battery life would be unacceptable. What I found was that it was pretty comparable to my iPhone. I charged it up around midnight, and then put it on my nightstand. Wifi and 3G were enabled the whole time. It was at ~90-95% charge in the morning. Pretty good to me. I took it into work, and being new it got a lot of use. It lasted the entire day, and didn't need to go back on the charger until about 8:30 at night. I image that during normal use after the new is worn off, it'll be able to go at least 2 days between required charges. I'm hoping 3.

htc_evo_4g_sprint_1.jpg

Cover: I don't like the removable battery and memory. To access them, you have to peal off the entire back plate. It's not gasketed, and doesn't really have what I think is a good seal. Meaning dust, moisture, etc will easily enter this phone. I prefer the iPhone design. My expectation is this phone is more prone to premature wear, under-screen dust contamination, etc.

Replacement cost. If I trash/lose the phone, replacement is $450. That's it. Only 2/3 what Apple is charging for same for an iPhone 4.

Integration: To my surprise, I found some things actually better integrated with the Android OS than I did on iPhone OS4. If I look up someone in my contacts to call, it also shows me their latest facebook updates and/or text messages from them. Lame? Not really, I already realized benefit from it today - I saw a friends car and stopped by to see if he wanted to go out for a beer. When I opened the phone to call him, I saw that had a Facebook update stating he's out of town for the weekend. So didn't bother waiting around to knock on his door. iPhones don't have that degree of integration.


GPS: Withholding judgement. I used the turn-by-turn instructions today to find an address I was looking for. It worked, and the GPS positioning was actually quite accurate. My iPhone always lagged by 100 yards or so while driving (I assume the iPhone 4 is much better). But launching the SPrint software to actually do the turn-by-turn had a ridiculously long log in period. Probably 30 seconds. And yes, that's a long time if you're in the car. That's an App specific thing, the other GPS apps were quite fast.


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Keyboard: The larger screen makes typing easier and faster than on my iPhone. The wide screen goes almost to the edge of the device. That's actually not a good thing, because I found that holding it in my palm, it was very easy for the edge of your hand to hit and activate the edge of the screen. It causes annoying mis-navigation. The autocorrect is going to take some getting used to as well.

Screen: My god, the acreage is amazing. The clarity is sharp and crisp.

Web Browsing: Pretty good. Seems like I had some mis-clicks, and on one website, they have you log in by a floating pop-up that asks user name and password. That was unreliable as it would float off the bounds of the screen, and when you started typing in the password, that pop-up would just disappear. Maybe a Flash thing? Annoying. Otherwise, browsing was FAST, easy, worked fine.

PC interfacing: I prefer it over the iPhone/iTunes, but that's a preference thing more than anything. When you plug in the phone, it asks you to select if you just want to charge, want to sync calendar/contacts, use as a USB stick, or use as a tethered device to connect your PC to the internet. All worked pretty good, except the last one, where it asks me for some kind of sprint user name/password. So not sure if I need to pay Sprint a service fee to use that. On contacts synchronization though, it didn't pull over any of my contact's associated photos from Outlook. Not sure why. It did pull over their facebook photo though if they had one.

One thing I really liked: I very often forward Outlook appointments to my home account from work, so they will be on my phone. With the Android OS, it will take those from the e-mail and put them directly into the calendar. iPhone won't. I like this feature.

Camera: What a drastic improvement over the iPhone 3G. Good enough to replace the pocket camera. Photographs documents and receipts crisp and legible, even in poor lighting. Not quite as good as a pocket camera, but close enough that I doubt I'll ever buy another pocket camera. Time to ask for a bigger real camera for Christmas.

Reception. Cell service is good in my area, but not amazing. The tower for my office is not near, so there are dead zones in the building. AT&T was a little better. Sprint is supposedly building a new tower in that part of town to correct this, but even if they don't, it's acceptable. Coverage in the house is also good, even in the basement, there are are low strength zones. Even with low bars, transfer rates are very fast. 3G is a nice upgrade.


wifi. Initially EVO's had poor wifi reception. As in, it didn't work unless you were within inches of the router. That issue apparently has been corrected, as I have good coverage throughout the house.



General impression: I'm liking it. A lot.
 
So 5 days in and still learning this thing. It's not as intuitive as an iPhone, but I'm OK with investing time into a learning curve, if it means I get to customize my phone a lot more in the end.

But the music player is just a bad joke. I mean... seriously? This is the best they could do? The music management is just horrible. I assumed it would at least be as good as a basic WinAmp/Windows Explorer combination style interface. Instead, it just lumps all your music into one listing, regardless of your subfolders. Good grief, they couldn't even figure out how to do the side rotation thing to let you flip through albums like on an iPhone? Is it really this hard? You can sort of sort by subfolder, by calling them albums. But that only partially works.

That aside, the device overall still satisfies. The huge screen was a good call, and makes a big difference. And I do much enjoy finally being on a decent network. 3G speeds are nice, AT&T should try upgrading from EDGE to that sometime.

One minor annoyance, the clock remembers its last position when you put the phone in sleep mode (i.e. turn off the screen). There's a .1 second delay from when you reactivate the screen, where it displays the old number. I don't like this.

The calendar integration continues to impress, nicely done.

The weather feature is just neat. When you awake the phone on the home screen, it displays a subtle overlay animation on the homescreen for the first few moments. You can still do everything, there's just little graphics going on too that are cool I love it, so when it's sun shiney, the sun has beams of light going across the screen. When it's raining, rain drops fall down the screen, and even a little wiper wipes them off. Cheesy, but I love it.

The app store is pretty good. Basically everything I had on my iPhone is represented here. Some renditions better, some not. It even has 1Password now - they finally ported to Android. Though the Beta is not as good as their iPhone version.

I've learned a few things about EVO too, that are interesting. The hardware specs are higher than what it actually runs. Android 2.1 is a 16 bit graphics OS, whereas the EVO has a 24 bit screen. The screen outperforms the Android OS, and is being throttled back by Android. Also, the phone is limited to 30 FPS display rate, but for no real reason. Rooted (which is the equivalent of jailbroken) EVO's can fly a lot faster then that, especially with Android 2.2 hacked onto it.

One thing I really don't like is the "expandable" memory really isn't. Apps, data, etc are installed on the MicroSD card - which is a lame 8 GB. If you want to buy another, and have it handy to swap out for more music, that's fine, but you'll lose your Apps and data when you do that. That's just lame.

The QIK video voice chat feature sounds really cool. I say sounds cool, because I can't actually test it, because it won't interface with a laptop on the other end - only cell phones. So the Apple-sucks because iPhone 4 will only talk to another iPhone 4 argument, effectively applies to the EVO right now too. That can be corrected by a software update later, but so too can the iPhone.

I'm really excited to test out is the HDMI output port. I intend to use that a lot, as I think it's a cool option.

Overall satisfaction score remains very high, but I did want to point out some of the minor things, for comparison. One item that I do like a lot more than my iPhone, the web browser doesn't crash. Actually, the whole phone is very stable. My iPhone crashed all the time.
 
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Welcome to android OS (iPhone user in the past), yeah definitely there some stuff I miss from iPhone too but I stilll got my ipod lol anyways the clock thing that you mention is because the phone goes to sleep and don't want to waste battery, the music player i guess is not the hard to do it but HTC don't want to get suit again lol but enjoy your phone to sinc your music from itunes use doubletwist or isyncr for pc you can find them In the market
 
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I also came from (still actually have a contract/iPhone with ATT as well) and overall love the Evo. It wasn't a huge adjustment for me though because I've been dabbling in open source (Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse, etc) for a few years now, and some things came pretty naturally.

That being said, the music player and youtube player ARE poor. Fact. Get these sorted and not looking like a 6th grader coded it, and it'll be just about perfect.
 
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Yea, I'm a brand noob iPhone convert, too. And there is a learning curve. I just got my EVO yesterday afternoon (after being on a wait list for only ONE day at my Sprint store).

If I had to describe the main difference, to me, it's that the iphone is just a big app drawer. You get multiple screens of apps. To get any actual information, you have to open one of those apps. I am really digging the widget concept right now.

My iphone 3g was laggy, slow and crashy as hell after I had "upgraded" to the newest software. The other day, I had to try literally five times to get CNN to open up.
Sprint's data speeds over 3g (no 4g here in Denver yet) are off the hook compared to ATT. Coverage seems fine too. So far I am more than happy I switched to Sprint.

My first day with the phone, and I unplugged it last night around midnight, and here it is about 11 pm and I still have life left. And I've been using it quite a bit, for me. Sorry I don't have numbers. But it doesn't look like the battery is going to be a big issue for me.

I haven't even plugged the phone into my computer yet. I don't really need to. Which is awesome. I LOVE the google integration on Android. I have yet to try to put music on it. I still have a lot (around 1k) of tracks that are drm'ed, and I'm looking for a good way to get rid of that, and then I'll pull all my tunes over to the phone at once. I'm going to start getting music from Amazon instead. Stupid drm.

Everybody talks about how the iphone has a more polished OS and better apps and is just a better experience to use. And they say how great Android is for only being a couple of years old. Well, that's bullshit. Especially with Sense, everything on this phone is just as good as on iphone. I think we can stop patronizing Android. It is really good, in the short time I've been using it. It is true that iphone is easier to just pick up and use. Well, that is because of 2 reasons: 1) every iphone looks the same, so you know what to expect when you get there, and 2) there is really nothing to the iphone beyond a couple of screens of apps.

I love that you don't have to put in a username and password when downloading free apps from the market.

That being said, the only thing I really miss about my iphone is how it did username and password fields. On iphone, you get that little "next" and "go" button. It's a little harder to move from field to field on the EVO. Granted, I've only done this a couple of times.

The other thing that's bothering me is the bloatware that comes on the EVO. There's very little of that on the iphone, and there's literally no ATT branded stuff on iphone. The EVO is practically painted in Sprint yellow. There's Sprint this and Sprint that. And if that's not enough, I have to wade through all the redundant apps that HTC puts on to compete with the stock android ones. I might have to root just to get rid of the commercials.
I'm loving it, and I'm looking forward to learning.
 
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i came from the iphone 2g,3gs and there use simply no comparison. I use my evo as a hotspot, a metaldetector,a flash video player. I have an app that measures gravity,Ems, solar activity, magnetic fields. ittranslates voice or even text off the page and reads it back in another language. what can't this phone do. UN half expecting it to gone mea table dance next week.
I would say by far the coolest thing is swype,i watched the world cup on my phone and nowI watch directtv on it.
 
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That being said, the only thing I really miss about my iphone is how it did username and password fields. On iphone, you get that little "next" and "go" button. It's a little harder to move from field to field on the EVO. Granted, I've only done this a couple of times.

you right, it could be better...but....

in most cases...you can enter your ID;hit enter on your virtual keyboard... it will jump to the Password field; enter your password; hit enter... it will then take you back.
 
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Already did - they're not much better at all, and certainly don't look better

screen


It may play more formats, but that's ugly as hell.

did you try : 3 cubed? very cool... needs a little more work..but very cool.

I still wish they would put in an EQ for music... it needs to sound a little better. Still fine for me for a phone / music / web browser / tv / entertainment / anything else you want it to do device!
 
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New EVO users I think will find great info is at these two sites, in my opinion:

HTC EVO 4G - Know Your Cell

HTC Evo 4G Hacks!

Here are some very cool apps, free from the Market:

Handcent SMS

Google Gesture Search - especially if you have a lot of contacts, this is wonderful.

Google Sky Map

Google Translate - add the Text/Speech option

Google Maps - as already noted, includes free/quick nav

Astro File Manager

Photoshop.com Mobile

CallTrack - if you'd like your call history to appear in your calendar, for setup, see:
http://androidforums.com/htc-evo-4g/123169-calltrack-show-call-history-calendar-awesome.html

QuickDesk BETA - seems more than beta; really extends your multi-tasking feel, if you're used to OS X - this is a Dashboard; I configure mine for launch by long-press on the search button

Wifi Analyzer - lets you know if you've got performance-hampering channel conflict on wifi

LED Light

The various widgets available under Widgets -> Settings, and especially the handy Power Control Widget (Android)

Remote Droid - if you want to use your Evo as a wireless trackpad/keyboard for your PC (Win or Mac); a great home theater PC companion

RealCalc Scientific Calculator - algebraic with parens; complete unit converter

Rings Extended - access any mp3 file anywhere on your SD card as a ringtone or notification

Thinking Space - if you're into mind maps

No Lock - if you want to quickly bypass the normal lock screen

Tricorder - complete fun, shows all sorts of stuff, including relative signal strength on which GPS birds you're tracking

Aldiko - a great eBook reader, easy to add direct access to Project Gutenberg as one of the custom catalogs; also Kindle and Nook are now available as apps

The built-in News widget/app is a really great RSS reader (I personally prefer it as an app).

Hope that's not too forward and a little helpful.
 
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wow... he DOES NOT like being able to open the phone to switch batteries? Prefers not being able to switch batteries. Since batteries only last so many charge cycles I can totally see why you would never want to be able to change batteries without taking phone apart. (sarcasm)

Memory is not upgradable? You replace the 8gb card with a 32gb card. That is upgrading. Unless your thing more storage space is not an upgrade.

I don't even want to address the music player just download a different one.

On a side note of how crappy iphone is - my friends 3Gs just died after less than 2 years. It will no longer charge at all and when his 37% remaining is gone it is gone. He ordered an iphone 4. I told him to have fun!

A phone should last longer than 2 years.
 
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I got my Evo on Tuesday. I had the 3G for two years. The iOS update from Apple crippled that phone and I couldn't take it's gimping along. My wife's 3GS is dropping calls tons more often since the update. What???

How can you not LOVE android? It's so much more seamless that iphone.

"Open email, read email, close email. Open SMS, read text from one person. Close it. Open another thread. Close it. Close SMS. Open ... STOP already!"

Fire up the Evo, drag the notification screen down and you're off! Read your agenda (want more info, tap it and open the callendar, open a day..."

How seamless is that.

Had to arrainge to take my dog for grooming. Open Maps, tap microphone, Said, "Pet Smart". Bing. It's up in a second. Hit the phone and it rings them for me.

Stupid easy!

Sorry don't care about music or videos, but I do have them on it.
 
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i love the shit outta google maps
i was in brooklyn yesterday and needed to get to triborough motorcycles
i searched "triborough motorcycles" in the google bar and the 1st result is the shop and it had the phone nuymber and address. i pressed on the address and it brought me to google maps and then gave me the option for directions or to navigate. hit navigate and boom its guiding me there and works as good as my garmin. the whole search process to having it guide me happened in under 30 sec
everything works so damn good and effortlessly.
i do like itunes more for music and still bring my ipod touch to the gym.
is there any way to put itunes on an evo?
 
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i love the shit outta google maps
i was in brooklyn yesterday and needed to get to triborough motorcycles
i searched "triborough motorcycles" in the google bar and the 1st result is the shop and it had the phone nuymber and address. i pressed on the address and it brought me to google maps and then gave me the option for directions or to navigate. hit navigate and boom its guiding me there and works as good as my garmin. the whole search process to having it guide me happened in under 30 sec
everything works so damn good and effortlessly.
i do like itunes more for music and still bring my ipod touch to the gym.
is there any way to put itunes on an evo?

I don't think you can put iTunes on Evo because it's a part of another OS. You can get your music from it though via iSyncr and DoubleTwist apps.
 
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hmmm. part of the OS? how do we all have itunes on our windows PCs?
doubletwist is ok, but blah

Perhaps I should have said it's the music player part of another company's software. Apple allows use of iTunes for media play on PCs, but they're not so friendly with allowing it's export onto media players. That would kill the whole iPod product line.

There aren't many generic music play devices out there being run by iTunes, are there? I haven't seen any. And if Apple found out there were some, you can bet on an armada of attorneys would show up packing lawsuits every which way you can think of.

What we have on our PCs is digital music play and management software, and I think iTunes base code is C++, which is why it works on PC environment.
 
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wow... he DOES NOT like being able to open the phone to switch batteries? Prefers not being able to switch batteries. Since batteries only last so many charge cycles I can totally see why you would never want to be able to change batteries without taking phone apart. (sarcasm)

Memory is not upgradable? You replace the 8gb card with a 32gb card. That is upgrading. Unless your thing more storage space is not an upgrade.

I don't even want to address the music player just download a different one.

On a side note of how crappy iphone is - my friends 3Gs just died after less than 2 years. It will no longer charge at all and when his 37% remaining is gone it is gone. He ordered an iphone 4. I told him to have fun!

A phone should last longer than 2 years.

3Gs ? The device is only a year old so therefore it can't be 2 years old , and all phones have up and downs but I think this one has way more UPS then down lol
 
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