David Pogue has a review of the HTC EVO 4G in the New York Times now and he is not impressed. Unfortunately he was seeing very poor battery life, and wasn’t able to visit any areas with 4G coverage. He had a lot of difficulty getting video calling to work, which is understandable since Sprint couldn’t even get it to work during their launch event. Even his collegue who had access to an area with Sprint’s 4G coverage said the reception was “spottier than a kennel of Dalmatians.” You even have to pay an extra $10/month for the Evo, bringing your monthly plan up to $80/month and that’s not even including the extra $30 to enable tethering. On the other hand the 4G speeds were 4 times faster than Sprint’s normal 3G speeds, which is still slower than T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network.
Of course, Pogue gets a few things wrong in places too. For example, the EVO includes 7 home screens, not 5, and he claims the EVO 4G is one of the first phones to support in-browser Flash via Flash Lite even though all Windows Mobile phone have had this capability built in for years.
The good news is that most of the disappointing, flaky and mediocre aspects of the Evo all pertain to its cutting-edge features.
Beyond that, the Evo is basically a technology demo.
Originally published on Pocketnow on June 17, 2010. More Smartphone News articles from the Pocketnow archive.