I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint‘s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for about 10 days and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you.  I have always used Sprint, since 1997 or 1998.

To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smartphone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Kyocera QCP6035 Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that required a stylus for input in a small box at the bottom and you had to write in palm script, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it.  the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Nokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface.  This phone was broken, while I was talking on it and walking my dog (the phone was pressed between my shoulder and ear, the dog pulled hard, the phone flew out and hit the concrete destroying the screen).  I replaced that cell phone with the Samsung SPH-I300 that was what would become the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons (the website I found the information on these two phones has them listed in order of discontinued date and states the the Kyocera was in use for about a year longer, I replaced the Kyocera with the Samsung, and that the Samsung had only been available for a week when I bought it).  I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 almost 5 years after I bought it!  I loved that phone, it came with 2 batteries, and I had adobe acrobat reader on it, that I used to read books, the battery would last 8 – 10 hours of constant use about 90% of the time, it came with a dock that charged the phone and the spare simultaneously.

After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college.  I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well.  So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.

I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive.  I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.

I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my Dell, and as the Dell was a 624MHz, the Touch was a 400MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space.  I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE which I upgraded to WinMo 2k5 and the Touch had WinMo 6.  the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.

I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi.  right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…

I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from Engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”.  so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not!  Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor.  I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died.  Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing.  I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “Incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 23rd HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”.  I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world!  The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!

this post was published using the Easy Tether application on Android via my HTC Evo 4G, over a 3G network with spotty coverage.  (I learned yesterday my cell coverage is poor where I am currently, because the there is no cell tower, the “antennas” are attached to a water tower, and therefore are not at the height that a normal cell tower would be, and as such is more easily blocked by building.  just a note, there are NO cell towers in this immediate area, I believe all carriers have antennas mounted on the same water tower, I’ll try and get a picture of it later and add it to this post.)