The Sprint HTC EVO 4G Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 28, 2010 6:04 PM ESTBattery Life
There’s no other way to put it: the EVO 4G has terrible battery life. It’s worse than the iPhone 3GS, worse than the Incredible, worse than the Nexus One and far worse than the iPhone 4. If you travel at all, this is not the Droid you’ve been looking for. All of our battery life tests were run from a clean boot with no extra apps downloaded/installed in the background. We didn't forcefully remove anything that shipped on the device however. This is representative of the out of box experience you'd get from a brand new EVO 4G. WiFi and 4G were disabled unless they were in use.
| Battery Life | ||||||
| HTC EVO 4G | Apple iPhone 3GS | HTC Droid Incredible | Google Nexus One | |||
| Wireless Web Browsing (3G) | 3.58 hours | 4.82 hours | 2.83 hours | 3.77 hours | ||
| Wireless Web Browsing (4G) | 3.58 hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | ||
| Wireless Web Browsing (WiFi) | 7.77 hours | 8.83 hours | 5.23 hours | 5.62 hours | ||
| 3G Talk Time | 3.95 hours | 4.82 hours | 5.82 hours | 4.67 hours | ||
| H.264 Video Playback | 3.63 hours | |||||
Continuous talk time is just under 4 hours. Wireless web browsing? 3.5 hours. The latter is actually surprising given that I measured 3.5 hours on both 3G and 4G networks. According to Sprint when the phone is stationary, power draw on both 3G and 4G should be relatively similar. When searching for a 4G signal however the battery life should be considerably worse, which is why many EVO owners resort to turning off 4G when they don't need it.
Video playback is also pretty bad. While the display is great for watching movies, even in airplane mode with the display cranked all the way up the EVO 4G only lasted 3 hours and 38 minutes in our H.264 playback test. That's not much better than most notebooks.
WiFi web browsing is actually realy good, at nearly 8 hours if you can stay off the cell radio you'll actually do just fine with the EVO 4G.
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Belard - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I'm not on Sprint... but a friend has this phone and its very nice.... and huge.If they come out with an unlocked version, I may consider it... but the size is both plus and minus. Yeah, the kick stand is handy. And doing TEXTING by voice without actually using keys is handy... he says it freaks people out because his responses are so fast :)
But with this being a "google" phone, the OS feature set should be the same on any other.
Belard - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
needed to add...Using the keyboard in LANDSCAPE mode is very easy, plenty of room... I never understood why the Apple iPhone didn't include this ability considering it knows how its orientated.
I was a bit shocked how well I can work with some webpages without having to ZOOM in (but more scrolling) while in landscape.
kmmatney - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
The iPhone has a landscape keyboard - I'm using it to type this post...Belard - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
When the iPhones first came out, it didn't.It was an after thought... common sense would be Landscape.
henrybravo - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
You'll have to change/clarify your comment one more time. The original iPhone had a landscape keyboard in Safari.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ZToHMUb7k
I suppose now you'll say "The original iPhone didn't have a landscape keyboard in everything else except Safari", which would be accurate. But 3 years later it's kind of a moot point. Not sure what you're getting at.
Acanthus - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I would hope for some kind of FroYo revisit to the EVO.Google claims 200-500% increases in performance.
chriscusano - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Yes, please! maybe this can help the scrolling problem?Also, what if you kill all those apps running? Does it improve any? (personally I'm more of a kill the app when done using it type guy anyway)
strikeback03 - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
That would require rooting, which they may or may not want to get into as plenty of users wouldn't. Plus the performance increases are in 3rd party programs that run in the VM, so I doubt the basic interface would see the kind of performance gains mentioned.chriscusano - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Spring $69.99 + $10 4G for unlimited everything?(see: http://anymobileanytime.sprint.com/?id9=SEM_Google...
DigitalFreak - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
No. It's unlimited calling to any mobile user, but you only get 450 minutes for land-line, roaming, etc.