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provocations & observations by William Plasencia 
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My Test Drive: the HTC EVO on Sprint

The HTC EVO 4G is everything a smartphone should be except for one fatal flaw that makes it difficult for me to recommend this phone to any road warrior or person who heavily uses the web. For the casual user, or less mobile people who can readily charge the phone, the EVO is perfect. Read on and I’ll explain.

The fine folks at Sprint let me borrow an EVO for week-long test spin earlier this month. I just happened to be travelling in the Baltimore area – where Sprint has a strong, high-speed 4G network – so I got to really put the EVO through its paces.

The short of it is: The combination of Sprint’s great, reliable network and the EVO’s fast processor and beautiful screen make it a really formidable phone, especially since Sprint’s data and voice plan is currently one of the best deals around. But all that power comes at a price and it shows in the EVO’s lackluster battery life.

By now, you’ve probably seen lot of images of the EVO. It’s much larger than its rival the iPhone, with a beautiful screen to boot. The picture and video clarity on the EVO are really outstanding, preferable to the iPhone 3gs though I haven’t spent much time with the iPhone 4, so I can’t compare those two. Streaming music and YouTube videos on the 4G network were blazing fast. Personally, I found it awkward to carry such a large phone in my pocket, but you get used to it and it’s surprisingly light. I recommend you not put a case on your EVO unless you plan to carry it around in a bag or purse.

I set up my EVO to connect to Gmail, my work email server, Facebook and Twitter. They all worked seamlessly. What I love about the Android OS is how well it works with all of Google’s services. I don’t have to sync: the EVO just pulls the info in from all the sources without a fuss. I didn’t try Google Voice on the EVO but I’m hoping to with the next phone I test drive. HTC, which manufactures the EVO for Sprint, puts an overlay called Sense on Android that does make it a little easier and more iPhone-like to navigate around the phone.

One Sprint-only feature that saved our bacon when we got lost in D.C. and in Baltimore: Sprint Navigation. This turn-by-turn GPS software is really useful and much better than relying on Google Maps. Worth the price of admission.

If you use your phone camera like I do, you won’t be disappointed with the quality of the photos the EVO takes. Even in low light situations, the camera performed very well and the photo quality is great, though there is a noticeable lag between snapshots that was a bit annoying. Keep in mind that the flash does eat into your battery life.

And that leads me to the Achilles’ heel of this phone. I started off at 9 a.m. with a fully-charged EVO and by 2:00 it needed a charge. Keep in mind that around noon I switched down to 3G speeds to conserve power. Now, I’m not a typical user: I’m on Twitter all day, I get a million emails and I surf the web constantly. But so do a lot business people on the go. That said, one of my best friends has an EVO and his solution is to carry around an extra battery, which I do too for my Blackberry. But for some reason HTC didn’t think of that when designing the back of the EVO, which is difficult to remove and replace.

For my friends who live in the Caribbean and in Latin America, the EVO should work fine for you in a lot of places. Sprint has good coverage in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru as well as the Dominican Republic. You can go on Sprint’s International website to see a coverage map for where you live or travel.

Bottom line, I loved the EVO but I wished I could love it longer. As for Sprint: I miss you. Please get a phone that I can work with (no sliders) so I can switch. 

(download)
Click on the gallery to see some examples of photos taken with the EVO.

 

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