The Sprint HTC EVO 4G Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 28, 2010 6:04 PM ESTThe FM Radio
The EVO 4G ships with an FM radio app. The phone uses your headset as an antenna so you need to have one plugged in for this to work. Once running however you can manually turn on the external speaker so you don’t have to listen to the radio over earbuds if you don’t want to.
There’s one large slider to select your frequency and two buttons to move the tuner in smaller increments. You can also create presets. Unfortunately there’s no way to record audio in the app.
Reception was surprisingly good indoors, but it did depend on where I had my earbuds. If I left them on my desk I’d get a lot of noise in the audio, but in my ears it worked very well for the stations I could tune to. It didn’t work as well as a car stereo for obvious reasons. There were some stations that would come in easily in a car that I couldn’t get at all on the EVO, while others worked perfectly. No surprise there.
It’s an iPo...Android Music Player, Too
As with all other Android devices legal music purchases are supported through an Amazon MP3 Store app. If you want to get your existing music library onto the EVO 4G you do it the old fashioned way: copy it over USB.
HTC’s Sync application doesn’t support music syncing so you’ve got three options to get music and photos onto your phone.
Plugging a USB cable directly into your computer will let you treat the EVO’s microSD card as a USB storage device. Put your MP3s in the Music folder and throw whatever videos you want on the device and you’re good to go.
You can also physically remove the microSD card and stick in a card reader attached to your PC. This is a bit more irritating of a solution as you need to remove the battery to gain access to the card.
The third option is the best but it requires an additional expenditure. The Missing Sync for Android is an application that allows you to sync your movies, photos and music over WiFi or Bluetooth with your Mac or PC.
The music player app is pretty straightforward. It just plays music. You do get a healthy amount of functionality in the app however. The usual shuffle and repeat modes are there, but you can also create ringtones while you’re listing to a song. Hit the menu button, hit create a ringtone and then you have the option of using the whole song or trimming it down to the portion you want. You can then go ahead and assign the ringtone to your phone or an individual contact.
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DaveGirard - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
you're missing the iPhone 4 in the battery life and there is only one phone in the H.264 page.And I think you need to set your white point properly for the iPhone 4 pics. Saying that's the best picture you can produce is not accurate.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
The iPhone 4 review is next, and the white balance was actually a problem for the iPhone 4 - regardless of where I tapped to sample the white balance pretty much came out that way.More on this tomorrow...
Take care,
Anand
SandmanWN - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
"The size of the screen is really what sets the EVO 4G apart from the competition, and honestly I couldn’t think of a better phone for browsing the web. Loading full websites is a pleasure and the screen is large enough where you can actually read a lot of content, even while zoomed in. I’d be willing to go as far as to say that it is almost too small for the ideal web browsing experience."This whole paragraph is confusing and contradicting. You say you couldn't think of a better phone for web browsing. Then say you you can read a lot even while zoomed in, which I think you meant to say out there. Then you contradict the first sentence and say it is almost too small for web browsing.
I think that paragraph needs a mulligan.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I've cleared it up a bit :)tipoo - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
It would be great if you could include Evo 4G benchies in the iPhone 4 review.rf40928 - Friday, July 2, 2010 - link
Yeah, I guess u saw the Evo benchmarks.I have an Evo and Im considering a Iphone 4 ( my cousin got one )..
I posted above the following: ... funny how the Iphone 4 review that Anand did proves Iphone 4 on a "slower" 3g network is consistantly faster then the Evo on a 4G network when it comes to the web .. I guess 4G's Peak performance is theoretically better.. but are Sprints 4G average 4g Speed numbers better then ATT's avg 3g speeds?? ..it would seem not.."
yibrushn - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Sorry just gotta make 2 corrections. The front camera is 1.3 mp and the screen is TFT not AMOLED.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Fixed and fixed :)Hmm that was actually a bit confusing, Sprint lists it as an OLED screen and it is very similar to the OLEDs we've used in terms of color calibration but all the data I can find points to a TFT display.
DigitalFreak - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I thought the screen thing might have been a typo, until I saw there was an entire paragraph describing the "AMOLED" screen. :-/Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
That was absolutely my bad. HTC appears to have calibrated the screen to mimic the other OLEDs, it's overly red. Combine that with the OLED listing here http://shopamerica.htc.com/cell-phones/productdeta... and it resulted in my mistake. I was wondering why viewing angle was so bad for OLED, I should've been more careful in my research there instead of just making an assumption. I will be more careful in the future.Thanks again for catching the error early on.
Take care,
Anand