The HTC Evo 4G has to be one of the most big and advanced cell phones in the world. It’s the first 4G phone in the world, it boasts an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3 megapixel camera on the front, you can turn it into a Wi-fi hotspot for up to 8 Wi-fi compatible devices, it runs Android 2.1, and more!
Pricing

The pricing is $299 after a mail in rebate or if you buy it from Best Buy, they’ll only charge you the price it becomes after the mail in rebate you get if you buy it from Sprint. In other words, you get a mail in rebate if you buy it from Sprint; Best Buy only charges you the price it would be after you get the mail in rebate if you purchase it from Sprint. So, if you buy it from Sprint, it’s gonna’ cost you $399 with a mail in rebate, if you buy it from Best Buy it’ll cost you $299. Here’s a summary:
Pricing

Best Buy: $299

Sprint: $399 with a $100 mail-in rebate

Wi-fi hotspot feature: $30 per month

4G feature: $10 per month

Pros: Everything

Cons: Sync only with Google and not Outlook, but that’s minor for me, major for some

Items included:
HTC Evo 4G
Battery
USB sync cable
Charger (must connect USB sync cable to work)
Getting Started Guide
Getting Started Guide in Spanish
Basics Guide
Important Sprint Information booklet
A plastic bag to mail your phone, battery, and accessories to the recycling center
8 GB micro SD card (preinstalled into the phone

Product Rating: 5/5

 

Design The design of this device is one of the best I’ve ever seen. This phone features a 4.3 inch capacitive touch screen, has a front facing 1.3 megapixel camera, an 8 megapixel camera with a dual LED flash, a micro SD card slot with an 8 megabyte card already included, a mini HDMI output, a micro USB charging port, a volume rocker, 4 capacitive buttons with haptic feedback, home, menu, back, and search, the power button on top, and to the left of that a 3.5mm headphone jack, a kickstand on the back to prop it up when watching videos, but it must be on a flat, solid surface to stay standing up, and that’s about it for the physical buttons on the device.

 

Customization, Software, and other topics about the Device

Android also has HTC’s customization, known publicly as HTC Sense. This moves the all applications menu to the bottom, a quick access dialer for phone calls, and a quick button for adding widgets and shortcuts. I personally like this myself, but if you don’t, you can add turn this off in Settings. It also has weather animations going on in the background. With this phone, there are 7 home screens with applications and widgets preinstalled on the home screen. You can, however, delete these off the screen by holding your finger on the widget or shortcut for 3 seconds, and then you can move it around on the same or different screen, or just remove it from the home screen altogether. If you remove it from the home screen, it will not delete from the phone, just off of the home screen. Pressing the home button while on the home screen will allow you to choose which screen you want to go to quickly, without having to scroll 3 screens to get to the one on the very left, or vice versa. I have noticed that most widgets have to take up a whole screen in order to get the most functionality out of the widget, I do like the full screen on the other hand, but get frustrated when I want to add another widget but just don’t have enough room. Maybe HTC should’ve put 10 home screens on the device, that would have been the perfect amount for me. This device has a 1 gigahertz SnapDragon processor, which makes the phone never slow down.

This phone also comes with a pre-installed 8 gigabyte micro SD card. It doesn’t have an adapter however, and when I put in a different card into the phone, it wouldn’t recognize it, maybe HTC likes to have a little bit of control, when I used an adapter from another micro SD card, it showed on the file explorer on my computer that it had special files for the phone.
When I tried to copy and paste into a folder for file transfer, it wouldn’t let me due to copyright reasons. In order to transfer music to the device, when you plug it into your computer using your USB sync cable, you must select it as a portable drive, which will pop up when you plug in the cable to the phone or the computer, otherwise it will keep you from doing so for copyright reasons, even if I transferred the music onto my computer through a CD.

In order to sync this phone with your computer, you must download an application from HTC’s website onto your computer called “HTC Sync”. This was a small letdown, but the installation to my computer only took a matter of minutes.

Camera-Back (Primary)

The 8 megapixel camera on the back takes great pictures, but looks grainy in little or no light. Have no fear; the dual flash will save the day when taking group photos outside a restaurant after dark or something of the sort. I was slightly disappointed when I found out there was no shutter button for taking pictures in landscape mode, which I like a lot when taking pictures. The device also has a built-in picture editor which can be activated by tapping the button that looks like a….um…, actually, in order to use the editor, you must pull out the menu on the left and preset the settings , which is also a small letdown. You can also share via Bluetooth, Facebook, HTC’s version of the Facebook app, Flickr, Gmail, Google Goggles, Email, messages, Peep, or Picasa.

The camera also lets you change the amount of megapixels it will use to take a picture. You can switch between Small (.5 maybe?), 1, 3, 5, and 8 megapixels, which is pretty awesome. 5 megapixels is good enough, the average rating for small cameras, and 8 megapixels is close to the big and bad D-SLRs made by Canon, Nikon, and Sony. HTC did a wonderful job on this camera and phone, and I expect to see more phones like this from HTC.

Android also allows you to have live wallpapers, in which you can choose several different kinds, including “Galaxy” and “Maps”. “Galaxy” basically shows a galaxy circling clockwise, and “Maps” will show your current location of where you are. This is one of my favorite features on the customization, apart from HTC sense, is indeed the live wall papers.

 

Camera-Front The front facing camera is 1.3 megapixels, which is common on most laptop webcams that are now built in. Picture quality is still good, but I haven’t figured out how to use the video chat capability (which is not in the manual included with the device). And while I sit or stand around trying to figure out how to use this feature, a Congressman in D.C. is trying to get a ban on video chat while driving, which when you think about it, is worse than texting while driving.

Calling

The call quality on this device is crisp and clear, and has one of the best signal routers in a phone I’ve ever seen. The bars at the top never go below four (there’s six total), while the Palm Treo Pro always hung around 2 bars. The device also has a built in sensor to turn the screen off when your ear is near the phone, and turn back on when you move the phone away from your ear as well. This function will not work obviously, if you have a Bluetooth headset connected.

As I said before in the specifications above, the phone also supports 4G and can become a Wi-fi hotspot, but first you must go online, call customer support, or go to the nearest Sprint store to have these 2 features activated. The Wi-Fi hotspot is $30 a month, and the 4G is $10 a month. The phone also features a mini HDMI output, but you must first buy a mini HDMI to HDMI cable to show movies on the phone or something of the sort.

 

Battery Life The battery life of the phone is quite good, but not good enough to leave it off the charger for a couple of days. It’s good enough, though to do whatever you need to on it and still have about 30% battery life left at the end of the day. Like all Android devices, the phone can only sync with Gmail, and also asks you to sign into your Gmail and other social networking accounts you are on. Best Buy is also known to help people set up and use their phone before you leave the store. There have also been cases of people getting batteries with oh-not-so-good battery life. So you may get a phone with good battery life, or you may not.

Tons of features are stuffed into this phone, including the camera, internet browsing, and more.

Internet Browser

The internet browser is unspecified; it only says “Internet”. It doesn’t look like Opera, but I’m not entirely sure. It does allow tabs, with a maximum of 4 tabs. To get this function to work, you must first press the capacitive “Menu” button, then click Windows. There is also a refresh button next to the URL box, which can be very helpful. When you press the menu button, it pulls up a series of options: “Back”, “Forward”, “Add Bookmark”, “Bookmarks”, “Windows”, and “More”.

Under the “More” tab pulls up another array of options, which are “Home”, “Find on Page”, “Text Selection”, “Page Info”, “Share Page”, “Downloads”, “History”, and “Settings”. So there’s quite a bit of settings and functions on the web browser, and the functions of a normal browser as well, but every website you type in it will either pull up the mobile or iPhone version of any website URL you type in., but most websites have an option to pull up the full version of the website.

FM Radio

This phone also has an FM radio application which, well, lets you listen to FM radio, but there is a downside, you must plug in a pair of headphones in order to get it to work. The FM radio is for local stations in your area only, I tried to pick up a radio station that I know is about an hour away from where I live, and it wouldn’t pick it up at all! Still though, it’s pretty cool to have this feature in a phone, even if I don’t listen to music that much.

Google Goggles

I’m pretty sure that not very many people have heard of this application for Android, Google Goggles. This application allows you to take a picture of a building, car, or something else of the sort and will search it on Google for you. This application is available simply by going to the app store, called “Android Market”, and downloading it. This application is free, but you must be synced with your Gmail account to be able to buy applications from the “Android Market”.

Text messaging

Texting on this device is… is, well, one of the best on screen keyboards’ I’ve ever used. There is one flaw, however: when in landscape mode, you must make the keyboard go away to send the message after you do that, and the portrait keyboard is frankly to small for my hands, and most of everyone else’s. The text messaging is an instant messaging layout, also known as chat style messaging. It organizes your messages by date, and any new message you’ve sent to a certain contact will have the date appear above it. Nice and handy, and is one of my favorite messaging layouts I’ve ever used.

Email- the widget and application

The email client allows you to have either Yahoo, Gmail (of course), Hotmail, Exchange or whatever. There are 3 different email widgets you can use: One of which you can flick through each email one by one, a list view of all your emails you’ve received, or a list view for Exchange. Unfortunately, you can’t put all of the emails accounts into one widget; you must have a separate widget for each email account, which is a BIG letdown for me. But overall, going into the actual application is nice, and so is the look of each of the three widgets.

People

The application “People”, is actually contacts. This displays all of your contacts arranged by First or last name. This is probably one of the only parts of the phone that seems plain; all of the names are in a list arrangement, and have a plain white background. Now there are 4 different tabs, which are: All, Groups, Online Directories, and Call History. Groups sort your contacts between Co-workers, Family, Favorites, Friends, and VIP. What “Online Directories” does is let you view your contacts through a Company Directory, your friends on Facebook, Flickr, and who you’re following on Twitter.

Overall, I would have to say that this is one of the best smart phone’s I’ve ever used, because of all the features, apps, functionality, size, and more. I give this phone a 5 out of 5 (5/5).