Sprint Evo 4G more information…

By finndo On June 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Ok, I went to the Radio Shack I purchased my phone from, they have had one return, for a very idiotic reason, the user reported that zero incoming calls ever rang through to the phone… I told the manager that I’d put $500 down that he accidentally setup Google Voice on [...]

Ok, I went to the Radio Shack I purchased my phone from, they have had one return, for a very idiotic reason, the user reported that zero incoming calls ever rang through to the phone… I told the manager that I’d put $500 down that he accidentally setup Google Voice on his Evo, but never logged into the web and configured it, nor did he have a gmail account, nor did they set one up with the phone when he bought it.  So, he has all of his incoming calls “blocked” by Google Voice and is not getting the voicemail notifications, because he did not setup his phone to receive gmail messages. HA! too funny…  Also, none of the employees in the store have even heard of ANY of the issues that has been going on around the web with the HTC Evo (see links at the end of this post).  I spent about 30 minutes at the store “educating” the employees about the problems plaguing the HTC Evo.

Afterwards I went to a nearby Sprint repair center, they have not had a single Evo returned, nor have they even heard of ANY of the issues that are being reported on the web. The sales person I talked to was fairly knowledgeable, although he admitted to only having seen 3 HTC Evo’s prior to mine, I was able to cover all of the issues within 15 minutes (they closed while I was doing this) and show him the light leak and the “moving glass” issue from my phone.

I’ve been using my Jabra Cruiser Car Speaker phone (BlueTooth and FM transmitter) with my Evo for 2.5 days now, and I must say it has been working very well.  I love it, I had 1 issue where the Jabra connected, but only connected for phone audio, not music playback, but I just had to turn off the Jabra and turn it back on.  Now, when I was driving home from Radio Shack and Sprint, I was listening to Pandora through my Evo and the Jabra, played out through my car Stereo Speakers.  It sounded, well… good although I have a 200 Ford Mustang with the 6 speaker CD player audio package, and the passenger front speaker has a major tear in it and I believe at least one of the rear speakers has a small rip in the speaker fiber (not the original owner and I received the vehicle in that condition…)  So I do not know if that is a good review of the sound quality.

Then I got home and had a lovely reboot issue, I turned off my BlueTooth Speakerphone, and the Evo locked up on my desktop/home screen with a message “BlueTooth Device Disconnected” in a pretty little grey bubble.  it sat on that screen for 3 minutes, then the phone rebooted.  But wait!!! it gets better… the phone got stuck on the 4G logo (after the video ended) and sat there for 10 more minutes, without dimming the screen, or shutting it off, then it rebooted again!!!  I popped out the kickstand and sat the phone on the kitchen table and started to eat my dinner… You won’t believe me, but it rebooted while I was eating AND stuck on the 4G logo screen again! then after 2-4 minutes it rebooted itself (off the 4G logo screen) and made it back to my desktop/home screens.  has not rebooted since and I did use my new headset to both listen to Pandora and to take 2 phone calls (about 80 minutes total).

Today I also received my Nuvelli stereo BlueTooth headset/headphones, they are a lot smaller than I originally thought ( a little smaller than a half dollar coin), sound pretty good for music and fairly good for voice, but not perfect; however my one severely audiophilic friend (one of the two people I have talked to so far, while using the headset) said it sound like I am underwater and have severe echo.  I then talked to my wife, who is very picky, and she said that I “sound like shit” and should return the headset.  I tried to sync it with my PC (Ubuntu 10.04) and the BlueTooth device manager said that my BlueTooth device does not support “input” (note, it also said this about my HTC Evo).

Since I was completely unable to find any real information on this device online, I have happily created an absolutely horrible unboxing which you will find below, including a pdf file of the English section of the manual (If you are reading this and would really like the Spanish version, you might be able to bribe me to scan the pages written in Spanish too… maybe), that I made myself.  You also will not find ANY of this information on the manufacturer’s website or even on Amazon.com.

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Sprint HTC Evo 4G review, part 4

By finndo On June 17, 2010 · 1 Comment

Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera… the camera takes acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a decent point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera.  I have not yet tested the 720p video but should be able to today, so I will [...]

Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
the camera takes acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a decent point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera.  I have not yet tested the 720p video but should be able to today, so I will update this post with tha tinfo before uploading it to my blog.  Right, here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between.  This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen.  again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus.  still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up.  So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first).  my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot.  one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry.  my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along.  maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels.  I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight.  I do not have this issue with my 4 year old kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. the digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x.  Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there are those two new sweet ass models from Olympus that have 30x optical zoom and 2x-5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android that might be capable of doing this.  But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, not night shot mode (although it does pretty good in loow light on auto!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. no option for taking panorama shots.
8. it does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. quality settings of high, fine, and normal
10. resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone.  so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. the effects are interesting, none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy)  they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display.  I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
14. there are manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them.  for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together.
15. there is a timeout of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, nor have I been able to sync any BlueTooth devices to it yet; however I have a handsfree car speakerphone with FM transmitter in the mail on its way to me, and a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming as well.  So, I will have some more information on this soon.  I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered a cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug, so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
While the camera does take some pretty acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a $100 point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera. Here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between.  This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen.  again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus.  still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up.  So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first).  my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot.  one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry.  my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along.  maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
2b. There is a setting in the camera for standard metering modes: center, average, and spot.
2c. Also white balance modes: auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Daylight, and Cloudy.
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels.  I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight.  I do not have this issue with my 4 year old Kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. The digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x.  Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there is that new sweet ass model from Olympus with 30x optical zoom and 5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android (there is one I saw “advertised” on AppBrain, haven’t tried it yet) that might be capable of doing this.  But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, no night shot mode (although it does pretty good in low light on auto! see the fountain shot on part 2!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. No option for taking panorama shots.
8. It does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. Quality settings are fairly standard: high, fine, and normal.
10. Available resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. Widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video but not available when shooting video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. There is the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone.  so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. Special effects, which are interesting to play with: none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy)  they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display.  I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
15. Additional settings are available, including: manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them.  for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together on one.
16. The Evo does have a sleep timer of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
Some video settings include:
1. Switch camera front/rear.
2. The same white balance options of the camera.
3. The same brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings screens.
4. The same effect screens.
5. Resolutions: 720p (1280×720), WVGA (800×480), VGA (640×480), CIF (352×288), QVGA (320×240).
6. Encoding options: H.263 and MPEG4.
7. Defined recording length: 1MB, 2MB, 10 secs, 30 secs, 1 mins (yes mins), 3 mins, or unlimited.
8. Record with or without audio.
9. The same metering modes as the camera.
10. Review durations: no review, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, no limit (seconds is spelled out on this screen, but not on the recording length screen).
11. Flicker Adjustment: auto, 50 Hz, 60Hz.
12. Auto Focus: on/off
13. Face Detection: on/off
14. Shutter Sound: on/off
It seems as though they left the setting there from the camera and just made changes for the options that needed to be different.
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, I did get to sync my Hands-Free Bluetooth car speakerphone with FM transmitter to it and I have been using that quite happily for 2 days now with only one issue, it appears that the BT speakerphone goes into sleep mode after 10 minutes if you don’t hit a button, as it did to me this morning while listening to music pushed out to my car speakers via the built-in FM transmitter, even though I did receive a 5 minute call in the middle of that 10 minutes.  I also have a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming in the mail that I will let you know about too..  So, I will have some more information on this soon.  I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered an HDMI cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug (and I cannot find any adapters…), so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
10 seconds of the ending credits of a movie taken on my Evo in 720p – details: 3.97MB, 1280×720, 12 seconds, 9fps, 6.00000 Mbps, type:video/4gpp video MP4V-ES
a video out the front window of my vehicle while someone else was driving taken on my Evo in QVGA (the lowest quality setting) details: 0.97MB, 320×240, 9 seconds, 29fps, 800Kbps, type:video/3gpp video MP4V-ES
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