Review: HTC EVO 4G

Alright people, I know the review was supposed to be up last week, but honestly I did not feel that I could have given the HTC EVO 4G a proper review after only spending a week with it. As it stands, of all of the phones I have had in my possession this phone is the most impressive. The phone is a powerhouse, but it does have shortcomings as does any piece of technology. So alright now for the breakdown.

Hardware:

-4.3'' TFT LCD screen with 480x800 resolution

-1 GHz Snapdragon processor

-512MB of RAM

-8 Megapixel camera, and 1 megapixel front facing camera

-Runs on Sprints WiMax 4G network

So the hardware is incredibly impressive as far as specs go. The 4.3" screen offers ample space for anything from internet browsing, to watching movies. The pixel density may not be as high as the iPhone 4, however the screen is still very impressive. THe 1 GHz processor combined with the ample memory offers plenty of processing power for anything that you would want to be able to do with your phone. The phone handles 3D graphics fairly well, but when compared to phones like the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Captivate the graphics underwhelm. But that is not that the phone cannot handle 3D graphics, they just are not as shiny as you would come to expect from such an otherwise impressive phone. The 4G antenna offers some impressive speeds and you can definitely notice the bump in speed when compared to the 3G speeds.

Software

-Running Android 2.2, FROYO build

-Using the HTC SENSE

The user experience here is the same as it has been for a while now. The normal Sense UI here is all you get and if you are a fan for it you will fall in love with it. The processor makes this the best HTC Sense experience that I have ever had, and I have tried plenty of other versions of HTC Sense. FROYO offers some nice features, like bluetooth searching, dialing and the works. The update also adds Adobe's mobile Flash. Flash works seamlessly on the phone but at the cost of a huge drain on battery. Honestly its something that you would only use, if you REALLY needed to view something in flash and could not wait until you got home. The phone also offers you a YouTube widget that allows for viewing high quality videos which is definitely something thats more useful than it seems at first. So one of the biggest things to come with this phone is the 4G mobile hotspot feature. This allows you turn your EVO 4G into a wireless hotspot, where up to 8 other devices can connect to it and use Sprint's very fast 4G network. The phone can give you about 3 hours of hotspot goodness of a full charge, which is very impressive.

Design

Well what can I say about the phone that pictures cannot show you all, its honestly one of the best looking phones on the market, hands down.

Here is the phone compared to the Motorola Droid (sorry guys did not know anyone with a Droid 2 would have made for a better comparison), as you can see the phone is large but still very thin.

One of the coolest things about the design of this phone is this kickstand on its back. This seems like one of those features where everyone says, "What am I ever going to use this?" The fact of the matter is that the kickstand allows your phone to become a small screen to watch your movies or TV shows. I found the two times I used the kickstand the most was when I was listening to music while doing homework, right in front of me I could see which song was playing and could change songs without actually having to pick up the phone. The second use for the stand that I found was to use it as an alarm clock. You can get a desk app that acts like an alarm clock with weather information and your twitter and Facebook profiles, this was very useful especially when you do not have a normal alarm clock on hand.

Final Verdict

The phone is awesome, it is a powerhouse and offers some very nice features. The graphics may put some people off, but honestly the quality is there the graphics are just not as smooth as they could be. The battery life on the phone is impressive, but it still falls into the same pitfalls as all smart phones, you are going to have to charge this one on a daily basis. Honestly a daily charge is definitely an easy price to pay for the amazing feature set you are getting with this phone. We definitely want to hear from you all about your thoughts and feelings about the phone. We will have another poll up soon so we can figure out what you guys want to us to review, also feel free to leave comments here for suggestions on things to review.

Hardware- 9.0

Software- 9.25

Design- 9.75

Overall Rating- 9.25 (Note: this is a rating of the phone, not an average of the three categories)