The Sprint HTC EVO 4G Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 28, 2010 6:04 PM ESTThe Network
I have a soft spot in my heart for Sprint. I had a great experience with the carrier when I bought my Palm Pre two years ago and I was shocked at how competitive its pricing plans were. For $100 per month I could get unlimited everything. While that’s still a silly amount of money, it’s cheaper than AT&T or Verizon and I don’t have to worry about keeping track of how many texts I’ve sent, minutes I’ve used or how many web pages I’ve loaded.
Raleigh, NC happens to be one of the cities where Sprint has already rolled out its 4G WiMAX network. I happen to live in Raleigh, NC. This remains one of very few times where a brand new technology actually favors my location and doesn’t punish me for not living in California. Sweet.
First, the rules. On Sprint’s 3G network you can send SMSes (but not MMSes) while you’re talking on the phone. You cannot browse the web, check email or use any other form of data while you’re active in a call. If you are on 4G or WiFi, the restrictions are off and you can do anything you want while you’re on the phone.
You'll get this error if you try to send an MMS or load a website while in a call on 3G
Now let’s look at 3G performance. A recent PC Mag article pointed out that Raleigh, NC was one of the slowest cities for cellular networks across the nation. Which means that on a good day I’ll get a bit over 1Mbps on my iPhone 3GS around town. That’s not bad by any means, but loading full websites over such a connection does feel tedious after a while.
Sprint’s 3G in my area isn’t much better, in fact it’s worse. I usually get 600 - 900Kbps. The one advantage however is that Sprint’s coverage appears to be better than AT&Ts. AT&T’s coverage is very discrete. It’s either great or absolutely terrible. Sprint and Verizon tend to be more consistent, but never spectacular. As a result despite the better performance I get on AT&T’s 3G network at my house, on average I tend to do better with Sprint and Verizon.
What about 4G? Well, here’s the thing - the problem with WiMAX is coverage. While Raleigh is outfitted with Sprint’s WiMAX towers, the coverage is horribly inconsistent not to mention the performance isn’t always what you’d expect.
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Good 4G Performance in Raleigh, note the relatively low 4G signal but high speed
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HTC outfitted the EVO 4G with two separate signal strength indicators, one for 4G and one for 3G. When connected to a 4G network with good performance I usually get 2.5 - 3.5Mbps on the EVO 4G. That’s fast enough to not only be noticeable but dramatically improve the web browsing experience on this phone. Note that if these numbers sound very low to you, it probably means you’re living in a city with far better cellular network performance than Raleigh. Yes it is that bad here.
4G and 3G Signal Strength
Unfortunately perfect 4G signal doesn’t always translate into great performance. There were a number of times where I measured down below 100Kbps on 4G despite having full signal on the EVO 4G. Oddly enough upload speed was usually better than download speed in these cases. My best speed test runs were with only one or two bars on the indicator. I’m guessing something is wrong with the way HTC is reporting signal strength.
Note full 4G signal, but horrendous download speeds
To make matters worse, 3G performance was often faster than 4G performance - not to mention that it’s more consistent. Sprint’s 4G coverage actually worked a lot more like AT&T’s 3G coverage - it was either great, or totally worthless.
3G Performance on Sprint
As long as it’s not on a tower with full 4G signal and poor performance, the phone is actually pretty good at picking the appropriate network to be on. It won’t linger too long on a weak 4G connection and instead switches back over to 3G pretty aggressively.
As big of a feature as WiMAX is, today it’ll largely go unused on the EVO simply because of the network at this point. Unfortunately regardless of whether or not you use it, there’s a mandatory $10/month fee on the EVO 4G to support WiMAX.
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Mr Perfect - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Ah, ok, that's fair then. Looking forward to the coming reviews.Thanks for the reply,
MP
mikephenix - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Most of the choppyness can be attributed to the 30 fps cap imposed on the OS. Both 2d and 3d framerates are capped at 30 fps on this phone. It's unusual that HTC would cap this device, when the nexus one and incredible do not have this cap in place:http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=6...
AmbroseAthan - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
One thing I feel like you overlooked is the Sprint TV.I own the EVO also and one of the things I have absolutely loved is the Sprint TV, and this is mainly right now for ESPN. Every single World Cup game is streaming live, so if I am for some reason away from the TV, I can watch. Even in only 3 bars of 3G service, it comes through very clean. With the kickstand, I set it up on a kitchen counter and a group of us watched Brazil play (grandpa had commandeered the TV for the US Open). Battery live looks to be in the vicinity of 3.5+ hours of TV.
I admittedly need to explore it more, but there are multiple live stations and several stations of older material.
ale087 - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I do see a degree of choppiness when compared to the iPhone and as you said it can be attributed to the lack of GPU acceleration in the UI... You should, however, mention in your review that there are optimized home replacements like ADW launcher and Launcher Pro that offer very smooth scrolling and better responsiveness, and excellent task manager/killer apps and widgets that help with memory management....Your browsing speed tests puzzle me, however. In real life tests on the same wifi network after clearing all cache, I consistently see the EVO and the Incredible render webpages faster than the iPhone 4 and 3Gs.... Also, the nexus one with the FRF83 froyo renders pages noticeably faster than even the iPad (with flash 10.1 set to on-demand or off), and its Java script performance far excells that of the other handsets and the iPad from what I have seen from other sources....
mongo lloyd - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Looking forward to a Samsung Galaxy S (A.K.A. Captivate, GT-I9000) review. Maybe that'll be the device Anand's searching for.ale087 - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,I remember you previewed the Galaxy S and left us all excited about its release, any chance you've received one to review? The international unlocked version is out and I would really like to see an in-depth hardware review to decide if I want to spend the big bucks for it. It would also be fantastic if you do an iPhone 4 vs. Galaxy S review since they have such similar hardware :D. BTW I think it's great that you're doing phone reviews! nobody else goes as in-depth into the hardware as you do, and it's great to get a better understanding of what's ticking inside of these devices...
Thanks!
Alejandro
spathotan - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Glad I went with the Incredible instead. Had it for about 3 weeks and I love it. Ive tortured it a bit and its passed with flying colors. Was downloading/converting 2 songs and 2 videos off YouTube while playing a 3D game (ZENONIA) all at once with ZERO performance lags. I was quite suprised.juampavalverde - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I will like to see the improvement of this evo4g with android 2.2, i have the feeling that with some time this android phones will just get better (also in battery life). Anyway looks great!Impulses - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
Many of them have already seen a steady improvement thanks to the user community of devs... If you're the sort that doesn't mind tweaking and messing with your device a little bit anyway. Personally I've never been big on any of that w/electronics outside of my PC (I want my phone, DVR, MP3 player, etc. to just "work")... But I've delved into the world of custom Android ROMs and whatnot and it really is quite amazing what some of these guys can accomplish, it certainly puts Google/HTC's stock builds to shame.Sprint has also issued two OTA patches for the EVO already (review was probably written before the 2nd one), the last one corrected some scrolling issues when the phone was not handheld (grounding issue I believe, personally I rarely encountered it even tho I read w/the phone laying on the table a lot) and made some other small improvements to the radio (which in turn should help w/battery).
Frankly I haven't been bothered by any performance issues w/my EVO, but my only real basis for comparison is a 2nd gen (slower) iPod touch so YMMV. Battery life was somewhat disappointing w/the stock ROM but has improved a lot w/custom ROMs and/or some tweaking of the default sync settings. By default it's set to sync several different accounts (FB, Gmail, News, etc. etc.) at different intervals, some as often as 2-3 hours. Anand made no mention of this, I wonder if he looked into that at all when testing...
The last thing I'll mention is that Swype blows any other touch keyboard out of the water, by a longshot... You really have to experience it first-hand to know what all the hype is about. It's still in beta (not hard to find leaked .apk's on the message boards) and I believe they're even gonna try selling it on the iPhone app market eventually (also available for WM).
Regardless, it's a joy to use, 'specially on such a large screen, I can type faster w/one hand and Swype (AND more accurate) than I can with two hands on a Samsung Impression (which has one of the better landscape/slider keyboards amongst feature phones out there). The freedom to try all these things out (w/o waiting for Apple or anyone's approval) is what I really love about Android.
smsmith - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,Thanks for the great review! Your iPhone 3GS sunspider time seems a bit high though. Just now I ran it on my 3GS and got 13771ms.