My Life with the HTC EVO

The HTC EVO 4G is not the best Android mobile phone out there but Sprint is the only carrier that gets reception at my house. Six months ago I began a rather extensive trial of a few different phones and carriers and balked at the EVO after a 30-day trial.

Certainly Verizon would have service in my area, everybody raves about VZW and after all it’s been 5 years since I last did my trials and found that I live in a cell service black hole, in spite of living roughly 3 miles from downtown LA and just over the hill from Dodger Stadium. This was not the case. Verizon service was equally as non-existent for voice calls as was AT&T. The difference being that AT&T offered me a femtocell signal booster (the 3G Microcell) for free whereas Verizon wanted me to pay $250 for their extender. In fact, when I talked to their technical department, I learned that my area is a known trouble zone and that NO TOWER upgrades were scheduled — it would be at least two years before there was any [better] service.

So why didn’t I stick with AT&T? I waited for the release of the Samsung Captivate, the AT&T version of the popular Samsung Galaxy S Android phone, but wasn’t satisfied with it. I am a user and abuser of mobile devices (as far as apps and internet are concerned) and my experience with the Captivate was a bit too laggy and buggy. I felt that perhaps the stock AT&T “bloatware” may have been bogging it down.

But EVO is not the best phone out there? I felt the Motorola Droid X, available on Verizon, edged it out for one reason: the major difference between the two phones is that DroidX boasts a 16GB internal memory while the EVO has a mere 512MB onboard storage. This shouldn’t make a difference to the average user and ostensibly more and more apps will be built to migrate to the external micro SD card (expandable to 32GB). But as a heavy user with 100 or so apps downloaded to my phone, I often get low storage warnings.

Battery life? The EVO will run all day if it’s used gently — primarily for voice or text. But for users like me — and I use it like it’s a second computer — a full charge can be depleted within 4 hours. My workaround was to purchase a backup battery, available for under $10 on Amazon.

I’m happy with the EVO. I’m in love with Android. I highly recommend that you get your hands on a device and check it out — at least for a 30-day risk free trial.