Screen Quality
9.0
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"It’s big, all right, and bright and beautiful (480 by 800 pixels). The hugeness pays off when you’re looking at photos, videos or maps, and whenever you’re reading anything."
"The Evo has a 4.3-inch touchscreen (by comparison, the iPhone’s display is 3.5 inches, while the Nexus One and Motorola Droid have 3.7-inch screens)."
"Much-loved 4.3-inch screen (480x800 TFT LCD)."
"The EVO fared a bit better in bright sunlight with the automatic brightness control turned on -- it didn't hurt to have a hand cupped over the display."
"The screen is terribly reflective; it's barely usable outdoors. Indoors, though, it's gorgeous—even better than the 3.7-inch OLED on the HTC Droid Incredible and Google Nexus One. Making the screen slightly bigger makes text more readable and icons more clickable without any visible jagginess."
"It has a larger screen than on other smart phones—4.3 inches measured diagonally versus the more typical 3.5 or 3.7 inches. That makes the EVO, like the HD2, bulkier and heavier than most competitors."
"The display shows vibrant colors and the sharp WVGA 480x800-pixel resolution makes everything look crisp...we were able to read the screen in most environments, but it did wash out a bit in bright sunlight."
Touchscreen
9.0
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"Turning our attention back to the front, Nexus One owners feeling burned by the finicky capacitive buttons can put their minds at ease, because the four examples below the EVO's display work just beautifully."
"In my hands-on tests, I found the touch-sensitive buttons quite responsive, as well."
"Even in portrait mode, we were able to quickly punch out a message with both thumbs (none of that pecking at the keys with one finger) with minimal mistakes. As you can imagine, the landscape keyboard is even roomier, but most times we found we could get away with just typing in portrait mode."
GPS
9.0
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"An excellent, free turn-by-turn GPS navigation program."
"The TeleNav-powered Sprint Navigation, available on most Sprint phones, offers voice prompts, spoken street names, and traffic alerts; you can use Google's navigation software if you prefer. Both apps displayed routes and locations accurately, but they're dependent on network coverage, unlike non-free navigation apps."
"You're also getting such features as Google Maps with Navigation, voice-to-text entry [free]."
" HTC packs...car-mode options."
Battery Life
4.5
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"The big letdown is battery life. If you charge this phone all night long, then leave the house at 8 a.m., you’ll find its battery charge at 50 percent by early afternoon, even if you don’t make a single call or send a single e-mail message. By quitting time, or dinner time if you’re lucky, it’s completely dead."
"I got 7 hours and 24 minutes of talk time on the EVO in 3G mode. That's pretty good, but the story is quite different on 4G WiMAX."
"Amazingly, we got some three hours and 13 minutes of run time while using the EVO continuously as a 4G hotspot -- and when we say "continuously," we mean we were streaming high-quality audio the entire time. "
"In my tests, it didn’t last through a full day with 4G turned on. The carrier, in fact, is thinking of advising users to turn off the 4G network access when they don’t think they need it, to save battery life."
"The smartphone was able to last about 12 hours before needing a recharge. With heavy usage, we were running for an outlet within a few hours and the mobile hot-spot feature definitely drains the battery quickly."
"I got more than 7 hours of talk time on 3G, I managed to kill the EVO's battery in three and a half hours of heavy 4G use, including lots of streaming media and hotspot usage (sometimes at the same time.) Fortunately, it's easy to switch between 3G and 4G, thanks to a convenient home-screen widget."
"Though Sprint hasn't released numbers for talk-time or stand-by time, I found that I was able to go a full day with moderate data usage without needing to recharge. 4G connectivity will definitely affect battery life, however, and we'll update our review once we're able to test it."
Making Calls
7.0
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"The EVO is a 4G phone, but it can't (yet) make phone calls over 4G. Call quality on this phone with Sprint's 3G CDMA network isn't that great, either...calls sounded rough and harsh as well. It's loud, but not clear."
"We noticed some fuzziness on our end of the line, but the volume was fairly loud."
"I was pleased with how clear my phone calls were in San Francisco. A few of my colleagues on the other end of the line noted that my voice sounded a bit tinny, but my voice was still sufficiently loud and clear--even while I stood on a busy street corner."
"Call quality was great. Our friends' voices came through loud and clear, with little to no background noise.... Our callers also reported great results, noting in particular that there was no kind of voice distortion and plenty of volume. "
"If you are in a 4G-connected area, you can use voice and data simultaneously. I'm sure you've seen those Luke Wilson AT&T commercials, so you know this is a necessary feature."
Speakerphone
7.0
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"The speakerphone is loud but sound is somewhat thready and hollow. Voices from the EVO's microphone sound harsh and flat on the other end."
"Speakerphone calls were decent. Though there was plenty of volume to hear our buddies even in louder environments, there was a bit of tinny audio quality."
Business and Email
8.5
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"Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Microsoft Exchange contacts all link together; when you call a friend you'll see her Facebook photo, and you can jump from her contact card to see her Facebook updates.... [You also get] Microsoft Office and PDF document readers."
"Once in the mail app, there's a handy tabbed interface at the bottom that lets you view unread messages, attachments, meeting invites, and more with a simple touch. The Agenda widget also now displays your whole agenda on the screen."
Gaming
8.0
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"When we fired up a racing game, Raging Thunder Lite, the Evo 4G rendered the track with good detail and had no trouble keeping up with the fast-moving animation (even if we had trouble avoiding the wall)."
"In addition to today’s Android apps, the performance of which will be enhanced by 4G speed, application developers will be introducing new apps that take advantage of 4G power in new ways – games and communications tools and other apps that bring together video, presence and location simultaneously, and capabilities that haven’t yet been imagined."
Media Playback
8.5
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"Audio sounded good, though, and the player supports a respectable range of audio and video formats."
"Streaming media seems to be 4G's calling, for now, and the EVO offers a wide variety of options. Rhapsody, Pandora, and Slacker all streamed music loud and clear, though I wish 4G improved their sound quality."
"Incredibly smooth HD videe…. The 4.3-inch (480x800) TFT LCD is bright and crisp, and the device features HDMI-out that can hook up with your TV given an adaptor. There's also that built-in kickstand, which provides an excellent viewing angle."
"When we got a signal, it was amazing. Hell, it was straight-up epic -- full, desktop-caliber websites and apps like the Market loaded with honest-to-goodness WiFi-like speed, and we were able to make calls over CDMA at the same time (this was a feature that Sprint said was on the bubble back at CTIA, so we're happy to see it made it in)."
"We also streamed shows from Sprint TV, but the experience was disappointing. Despite having a 4G connection, there were some breaks in the clips and audio and videos weren't always synched up."
"YouTube HQ does exactly what it advertises -- it significantly boosts your video quality on a high-speed connection. We played a few high-def clips, and the difference is patently noticeable; not only are they smoother and crisper, but they actually take up all of the EVO's huge display rather than being needlessly constrained to a smaller box."
"You don't have Hulu, but Sprint TV nowadays is almost as good, with content from Disney, FOX, USA, ABC, CBS, NBC, Bravo, ESPN, SyFy, and other.... Shows looked smooth and clear. TV.com shows, on the other hand, looked low-res—they appeared to be upscaled from 320-by-240 videos."
Software and Applications
8.5
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"Along with the standard Android applications, such as Gmail, Google Talk, and YouTube, the phone offers HTC's Twitter app (Peep) and its photo-geotagging app (Footprints). In addition, you get a handful of Sprint apps, like SprintTV, Sprint Navigation, Sprint Zone, and Sprint Football Live."
"The Android market now stocks well over 38,000 apps in a wide range of categories. All of the apps we tried worked fine, including Facebook, Pandora, TripIt, and Yelp."
"There's a ton of useful software on here.... Desk-clock and car-mode options, along with an FM radio, a Twitter client, two GPS navigation options (Google's and Sprint's), a combined social-networking client called "Friend Stream," Microsoft Office and PDF document readers, and Sprint's streaming TV, NASCAR, and NFL applications. Third-party apps run quickly on the 1-GHz processor."
"HTC also throws in a few of its proprietary apps, including the Peep Twitter client and Footprints, which uses the phone's GPS to capture favorite locations and lets you chronicle trips with geotagged photos and notes."
"Like other Android phones, it has limited storage for third-party apps—just 358 megabytes of total memory capacity of 9 gigabytes."
"Downloading apps from the Android Market took just a few seconds, and downloading individual tracks from the Amazon MP3 averaged around 15 seconds or less; an entire album took 7 minutes to download."
Web Surfing
10.0
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"The Evo runs something called Flash Lite, which is marketing-ese for, “Sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.” It plays videos on some sites that the iPhone can’t — on Engadget, for example, plus all the blinking ads (a mixed blessing). But it still can’t play the Flash videos on CNN.com or, sadly, TV shows on Hulu.com."
"Especially with 4G, the EVO offers a spectacular Web experience. Pages render fast, you can pinch to zoom in the built-in browser, and you can select from several different browsers in the Android Market."
"It also runs Flash seamlessly, a mandatory point these days to differentiate from the Apple mobile products that don't."
"Anyhow, Hotspot seriously couldn't be easier to use…. In fact, it worked so well that we'd argue it obsoletes dedicated mobile hotspot devices like the Overdrive and MiFi."
"The EVO was much faster than an iPhone using AT&T’s (T) network, which in Baltimore never got to even 1 mbps downstream and in D.C. averaged about 1.8 mbps. Verizon’s (VZ) new Droid Incredible, another HTC Android phone, did well in both cities, averaging about 2 mbps downstream, but that was still slower than the EVO."
User Interface
9.0
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"Like the Droid Incredible and the Desire, it runs almost eerily smoothly -- and if you like Sense, this is exactly the kind of processor (you know, the 1GHz kind) that you want to be running."
"Sense is our absolute favorite, as it gives Android a more user-friendly interface. In many cases, it improves on the core functions by better integrating the features, which is why we're glad to see that Sprint had the sense (sorry) to go with Sense on the Evo 4G."
"Evo will run on the much sleeker Android 2.1. It'll be one of the first US phones to sport the latest and greatest Android OS."
"Out of all of the custom skins for Android, HTC Sense is definitely my favorite. It is the easiest on the eyes, and it doesn't bog down the operating system by trying to do too much."
"The phone runs the Google Android 2.1 OS with HTC's Sense UI extensions. HTC rewrote the dialer, contact book, calendar, and home screen (among other apps) to make them more usable."
"Below the screen, you get four touch-sensitive navigation controls: home, menu, back, and search. A long press of the home key will bring up a list of your most recently used apps."
"The familiar HTC Sense UI skin is there, too, nestled atop Android 2.1 and impressively responsive."
Social Networking
8.0
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"Another feature called Friend Stream provides a single place for all your social-networking needs, piping in updates from Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr all into a single place. Unlike Motoblur, it's not server-based; the phone connects to the sites and pulls information directly from there."
"Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Microsoft Exchange contacts all link together; when you call a friend you'll see her Facebook photo, and you can jump from her contact card to see her Facebook updates."
"Friend Stream, HTC's social network aggregator, allows you to view your friends' status updates, shared links, and pictures all in one seamless view. Supported social networks include Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and others."
"Sense also makes it easy to access as much information as possible within the contact management system. If any of your contacts have Facebook updates, it will display them right next to their pictures in the contact database. You can also see all your exchanges (text messages, call logs, etc.) with a single person from their contact card, and all your contacts are accessible within the phone app."
Speed and Responsiveness
9.5
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"Third-party apps run quickly on the 1-GHz processor."
"It wasn't nearly as zippy as the Droid Incredible, but we were still able to launch and work in apps with minimal delay. That's not to say that it was all roses and peaches. "
"The EVO 4G runs on Qualcomm's 1GHz Snapdragon processor. The EVO 4G was pretty speedy in my hands-on tests, even when I had multiple applications open. Applications launched quickly, too, though a few crashed on me (Sprint Football Live and Qik were the offenders)."
Style
8.0
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"Wherever you go, people notice this phone. They notice it against your face, they notice it set on a table. In fact, it's hard to not notice. We find it to be an extraordinarily sexy device, and passers-by we encountered seemed to agree."
"Design-wise, the EVO 4G is a bit imposing with its 4.3-inch WVGA (800-by-480-pixel) touchscreen, glossy black bezel, and blood-red detailing."
"If the HTC Evo looks familiar, that's because it is: the body may have some slight aesthetic modifications, but it's essentially a Touch HD2. Good thing, too—John referred to that device as "a perfect specimen of glass, plastic and aluminum."
"Cut from the same cloth as the HTC HD2, the HTC Evo 4G isn't what you'd call a dainty phone."
Size
7.5
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"Unfortunately, physics has some fine print of its own — and one of the footnotes says that you can’t have a big screen on a small phone. The Evo is nice and thin, but it’s also tall and wide."
"Measuring 4.8 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches, the EVO 4G is also a bit larger than your average smartphone. Even so, it feels pretty comfortable to hold (and my hands are small), and I was able to use it with one hand without any issues."
"Mind you, the EVO's gargantuan surface area erases any notion that it's a "thick" phone, but it does feel perceptibly beefier in the hand than either the HD2 or the 11.5mm Nexus One."
"The EVO is a big black slab, superficially similar to the HTC HD2."
"With the Evo feeling substantial in the hand but slim enough that it couldn't ever be considered bulky."
"You're dealing with a good chunk of hardware. It's right on the cusp of being too big, but HTC was able to keep the Evo relatively thin, so it's a bit more manageable."
Build and Ergonomics
7.0
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"When the capacitive buttons below the display are lit, there's a ton of light leakage along the bottom.... In dimmer environments, it's definitely enough leakage to notice and give the phone a visibly cheaper look to it."
"The sharp top edge of the phone wasn't very comfortable against my ear…"
"It doesn't feel utterly unmovable like you'd expect a glass display to, but it's far from flimsy; you can just barely detect a hint of give if you really press it…"
"What really concerns us here is that the phone rests directly on the lens, which is pretty unheard of; modern smartphones with decent cameras have a tendency to either recess the lens or conceal it with a sliding cover."
Typing and Texting
7.0
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"The phone doesn't have a physical keyboard, so you're reliant on HTC's touch keyboard. While it's visually attractive and more accurate than the standard Android keyboard, it's nowhere near as easy or accurate as the iPhone keyboard; I found myself making more errors than I do either on an iPhone or on the physical keyboard of a BlackBerry."
"Another benefit of the large display is a spacious keyboard that rivals the iPhone's in ease of use. Even in portrait mode, we were able to quickly punch out a message with both thumbs (none of that pecking at the keys with one finger) with minimal mistakes. As you can imagine, the landscape keyboard is even roomier, but most times we found we could get away with just typing in portrait mode."
"Honestly, the native Android keyboard isn't my favorite; the keys are too narrow and tightly packed, and its dictionary isn't always as on-point as the iPhone 3GS's. For an alternative, however, I recommend downloading the keyboard app ThickButtons, which follows a letter-by-letter algorithm to shrink the letters that you aren't likely to use and enlarge the buttons that you are."
Camera Quality
8.5
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"The EVO 4G goes a step further with an 8-megapixel camera with a dual-LED flash. As with the iPhone 3GS, you can touch to focus on a subject. The camera's user interface is pretty straightforward, too, and it offers a handful of advanced controls such as exposure, color, white balance, and various photo effects."
"Picture quality, on the other hand, was great, whether we were shooting indoors or outdoors. Images were sharp and color tones were pretty true to life."
"The shots had a little bit more splotchiness and noise (er, make that noise reduction) than we would've liked, but they still looked just great scaled down to monitor size; as with pretty much any phone camera, you're not going to want to blow these up and frame them for an art exhibition. What really blew us away wasn't the picture quality, but the shutter lag -- or rather, the lack thereof. You go to take a shot, and boom, the shot's taken."
"The EVO 4G boasts two cameras. On the front, there's a basic 1.3-megapixel webcam for taking self-portraits and making Qik videos. The rear camera is an 8-megapixel model with 720p hi-def video recording, but that doesn't cure it of typical cameraphone ills. Indoor photos have a major problem with soft focus and blur, and outdoor photos look oversharpened."
Video Recording
9.5
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"Compared to the HTC Droid Incredible, we see an improved video camera."
"We wouldn't go ditching your 1080 camcorder just yet, though. The Evo certainly did a better job than most camera phones, capturing action with minimal blurriness or pixilation. That said, there's still a slight grainy quality to the videos."
"As for video quality, we don't think that calling it "720p" really does it justice. We appreciate the fact that we could select between MPEG4 and H.264 output, but when you drop the file on your machine and play it back in QuickTime, it's immediately evident that HTC wasn't shy about compressing the crap out of your output."
"The EVO 4G boasts two cameras. On the front, there's a basic 1.3-megapixel webcam for taking self-portraits and making Qik videos. The rear camera is an 8-megapixel model with 720p hi-def video recording….Videos recorded at 720p looked a bit jerky; VGA-resolution videos, on the other hand, were sharp and smooth."
"One of my favorite mobile apps, Qik allows you to stream live videos from your phone to your family and friends, as well as to share them via social networking sites like Facebook. And, yes, Qik supports HD-quality videos."
Customer Service
7.5
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HTC received a 3 out of 5 in a JD Power study, which measured companies across 6 criteria to determine customer service satisfaction. HTC tied for 3rd out of the 7 cell phone manufacturers in the survey.
"Based on BBB files, this business has a BBB Rating of B+ on a scale from A+ to F. Reason for this...[is] Business has failed to resolve underlying cause(s) of a pattern of complaints."
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Review Score
8.9
smart average based on expert reviews
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Release Date
June 04, 2010
Screen
Screen Size:
4.3 inches
Screen Resolution:
480x800
Has
Multitouch Functionality
Has
Touchscreen
Features
Has
Wi-Fi
Has
Voice Dialing
Has
Voice Recorder
Has
Multitask Capability
Has
GPS
Has
Bluetooth
Has
Polyphonic Ringtones
Has
Push to Talk / Direct Connect
Size
Volume:
6.2 inches ^3
Depth:
2.6 inches
Weight:
6 oz
Width:
4.8 inches
Has
Microsoft Exchange Corporate Email
Software
Has
Google Android
Network
Has
3G or Faster Internet
Has
CDMA Network
Memory
MicroSD Memory Support Up To:
32 GB
Has
MicroSD Support
SD Card Size:
8 GB
Built-in Memory:
1 GB
Connectivity
Has
3.5mm Headphone Jack (Standard Size)
Has
Micro-USB Charger
Camera & Video
Camera Resolution:
8 MP
Max Video Resolution:
1280x720
Has
Video Recording
Has
Camera
Has
Camera Flash
Hardware
Processor Speed:
1000 MHz
Carrier
Has
Sprint
