24 hours is a fast period for a good review. Too much not really tested. The real question is what do you think of it in a year. But what the heck, here's what I think so far.

Phone is hardware release 3, with the latest patches.

Activation Fee. I've always thought these were Lame. And since Sprint doesn't charge an activation fee if you buy on line, even more lame, since obviously it's not a necessary cost. For two phones, they hit me for $70 in activation fees. So based on a little coaching, I called them the next day, and said I was thinking about switching back to AT&T. So they took off one of them.

AT&T quality care. As a final F. U. from AT&T, they have made it clear that to port my numbers over, I will need to either do it before contract expires, and pay an early termination fee. Or extend my service by one full month (1 day = 1 month to them). Because if I just termination my contract on termination day, then they are going to release my numbers. But if I change my mind, I can reactivate within 2 months....

So those of you in my phone contacts that have smart-phones, you might be receiving a new text in a couple weeks with a new contact card (and phone number) for me. We'll see, I'll try porting anyway on the day of my AT&T termination, just to see what happens.
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On to the phone:

Battery: the biggest concern I had with this phone was that battery life would be unacceptable. What I found was that it was pretty comparable to my iPhone. I charged it up around midnight, and then put it on my nightstand. Wifi and 3G were enabled the whole time. It was at ~90-95% charge in the morning. Pretty good to me. I took it into work, and being new it got a lot of use. It lasted the entire day, and didn't need to go back on the charger until about 8:30 at night. I image that during normal use after the new is worn off, it'll be able to go at least 2 days between required charges. I'm hoping 3.


Cover: I don't like the removable battery and memory. To access them, you have to peal off the entire back plate. It's not gasketed, and doesn't really have what I think is a good seal. Meaning dust, moisture, etc will easily enter this phone. I prefer the iPhone design. My expectation is this phone is more prone to premature wear, under-screen dust contamination, etc.

Replacement cost. If I trash/lose the phone, replacement is $450. That's it. Only 2/3 what Apple is charging for same for an iPhone 4.

Integration: To my surprise, I found some things actually better integrated with the Android OS than I did on iPhone OS4. If I look up someone in my contacts to call, it also shows me their latest facebook updates and/or text messages from them. Lame? Not really, I already realized benefit from it today - I saw a friends car and stopped by to see if he wanted to go out for a beer. When I opened the phone to call him, I saw that had a Facebook update stating he's out of town for the weekend. So didn't bother waiting around to knock on his door. iPhones don't have that degree of integration.


GPS: Withholding judgement. I used the turn-by-turn instructions today to find an address I was looking for. It worked, and the GPS positioning was actually quite accurate. My iPhone always lagged by 100 yards or so while driving (I assume the iPhone 4 is much better). But launching the built-in software to actually do the turn-by-turn had a ridiculously long log in period. Probably 30 seconds. And yes, that's a long time if you're in the car. That's an App specific thing, the other GPS apps were quite fast.



Keyboard: The larger screen makes typing easier and faster than on my iPhone. The wide screen goes almost to the edge of the device. That's actually not a good thing, because I found that holding it in my palm, it was very easy for the edge of your hand to hit and activate the edge of the screen. It causes annoying mis-navigation. The autocorrect is going to take some getting used to as well.

Screen: My god, the acreage is amazing. The clarity is sharp and crisp.

Web Browsing: Pretty good. Seems like I had some mis-clicks, and on one website, they have you log in by a floating pop-up that asks user name and password. That was unreliable as it would float off the bounds of the screen, and when you started typing in the password, that pop-up would just disappear. Maybe a Flash thing? Annoying. Otherwise, browsing was FAST, easy, worked fine.

PC interfacing: I prefer it over the iPhone/iTunes, but that's a preference thing more than anything. When you plug in the phone, it asks you to select if you just want to charge, want to sync calendar/contacts, use as a USB stick, or use as a tethered device to connect your PC to the internet. All worked pretty good, except the last one, where it asks me for some kind of sprint user name/password. So not sure if I need to pay Sprint a service fee to use that. On contacts synchronization though, it didn't pull over any of my contact's associated photos from Outlook. Not sure why. It did pull over their facebook photo though if they had one.

One thing I really liked: I very often forward Outlook appointments to my home account from work, so they will be on my phone. With the Android OS, it will take those from the e-mail and put them directly into the calendar. iPhone won't. I like this feature.

Camera: What a drastic improvement over the iPhone 3G. Good enough to replace the pocket camera. Photographs documents and receipts crisp and legible, even in poor lighting. Not quite as good as a pocket camera, but close enough that I doubt I'll ever buy another pocket camera. Time to ask for a bigger real camera for Christmas.

Reception. Cell service is good in my area, but not amazing. The tower for my office is not near, so there are dead zones in the building. AT&T was a little better. Sprint is supposedly building a new tower in that part of town to correct this, but even if they don't, it's acceptable. Coverage in the house is also good, even in the basement, there are are low strength zones. Even with low bars, transfer rates are very fast. 3G is a nice upgrade. The bigger question is how is Beaker's coverage on her drive to work - data we won't get for a couple more weeks.

And just an aside, what on Earth was Apple thinking when they spec'd an exposed antennae that the conductive operator is touching during use? Did they not realize this was going to be subject to all kinds of electrical ground/god-knows-what interferences? This is what happens when you hire all young design engineers - no one remembers what happens to the TV when you touched the rabbit ears as a kid.

wifi. Initially EVO's had poor wifi reception. As in, it didn't work unless you were within inches of the router. That issue apparently has been corrected, as I have good coverage throughout the house.



General impression: I'm liking it. A lot.