I’ve been getting a lot of inquires about how I like the HTC EVO 4G, which, as I related, Ray and I went out and bought on launch day like the geeks we are.  Usually, I respond with “I love it!” — which is, overall, true.  It’s a phone with a learning curve, though — as I’ve seen pointed out by others, one of the main differences between the iPhone and smartphones running the Android OS is that it takes a bit of tweaking on Android to get your phone to do exactly what you want it to do.  This isn’t an issue with the iPhone — you either love it the way it is, or you don’t, but unless you want to void your warranty by jailbreaking it, you’re kind of stuck with it the way it is.

Given the glee about the EVO on sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, I hadn’t seen too many negative reviews around launch, which is one  of many reasons why I found myself rather annoyed by the normally impeccable David Pogue at the New York Times and a review that seemed like a laundry list of cheap shots at the EVO compiled on an iPhone fanboy forum somewhere.  While his print review is a little more even handed, the video that accompanies it is ridiculously unfunny (unless, of course, you’re an iPhone fanboy).

Let me start from the beginning with my own impressions as an actual EVO owner and user.  In full disclosure, I upgraded to an EVO from a Samsung Instinct — the first of the line, again, purchased on the day of launch by my partner who was (as, admittedly, was I) tempted by promises that the Instinct was the “first serious competition to the iPhone.” Unfortunately, that turned out not to be true for any of the Instinct line, especially for the first generation of the phone.  Promised user-developed apps never materialized, and, after two years, I was stuck with a phone that was slower than sin and had gone from not needing to be charged on a daily basis to having a battery life of about 12 minutes.

Part of the reason why we don’t just break down and get iPhones is that we’re actually fairly happy with Sprint.  This is, of course, subjective.  Everyone has a cellular company they love.  Everyone has a cellular company they hate.  Interestingly, if you stack them up, there’s a fairly negligible difference in customer satisfaction between all the US major providers, and I’ve come to view them like I do airlines: it’s not about which one I think is best, but about which one I think sucks the least.  I don’t want to say that I love Sprint so much (T-Mobile is quite firmly in the “hate” column for me), but I’ve heard enough about AT&T overstretching its network to have my doubts about switching (and please, don’t write in with your “why I hate Sprint” stories. They’re your stories, not mine).

We were originally planning to wait until the iPhone 4 was announced, but then AT&T did that thing with its data plans, and we were pretty much set to go.  And believe me, the notion of being able to have a jailbroken iPhone so that I could just swap out SIM cards when I travel instead of having to carry my Sprint CDMA phone and a separate GSM handset was attractive.

And so, here are my thoughts.

Call quality: Before I go off on other tangents, let’s not forget that the EVO is, first and foremost, a phone!  I’ve only dropped calls when it’s the other person’s phone doing the dropping, and the calls are crystal clear.  Although it took a bit of time to figure it out, I’ve even been able to make Skype calls of passing decency from the phone as well, using the Fring application.

Some people have complained that the EVO is too big.  Frankly, I don’t find it that large, especially when compared with the much ballyhooed iPhone.  It’s a little larger than the Instinct, but until they come up with a way to make LCD screens fold in half, you’re just not going to have a smartphone with a large screen and a small footprint. References to the EVO as an “iPad Nano” are petty.  What it does do is increase the screen area: there are only four physical buttons on the handset.  (Compare this to the iPhone’s single button.)

It’s quite zippy — of course, my last phone was about as slow as they get, so anything would seem fast.  The much promoted ability to multitask is both a benefit and an annoyance, however.

Positive case in point: I use KeePass as my primary password storage.  I keep the database stored on DropBox, and I can access the same password bank from work and home.  By the way, if you’re curious about Dropbox, please use my referral so that I can get extra space.  Thanks   Both applications have Android apps, which means that I can, in a pinch, access something out of my DropBox on my Android, but also that I can use KeePass to access Web sites via the Internet browser by accessing the password database that I store on DropBox.  Learning to cut and paste on the Android was less than user intuitive, but it works great with KeyPass because you can do it with one click from the notifications bar (I still can’t really “cut” or “copy” normal text).  The ability to switch from Web browser (or app) to KeyPass to clipboard back to browser-or-app without having to close-and-restart all of them is convenient … once I figured out that holding the “home” button will show all of the apps currently running.

Negative case in point: Because of the multitasking some … ok, many … apps don’t actually close when you minimize them.  Add to this the apparently high percentage of developers who didn’t think to make an “exit” option on any of the menus within their apps, and you wind up with a very, very large number of applications that will continue to run and suck up both memory and battery power after you close them and are long done with them.  As many people have pointed out on various forums, one of the things that Android lacks is a task manager — you have to download one, and go in and manually close the applications yourself.

The EVO is running Android 2.1 — I don’t know whether this is addressed in 2.2 “Froyo,” but it ought to be.

4G service: if there was one place that I found David Pogue’s review to be just over the top, it was in his comments about the existing 4G markets:

Hard to say, since I couldn’t find any 4G reception, even in weeks of traveling. My problem, evidently, was that I was visiting major cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco. So far, Sprint has installed 4G coverage in only 32 areas — and they’re bustling metropolises like Boise, Idaho; Wichita Falls, Tex.; High Point, N.C.; and Milledgeville, Ga.

Uh, Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, and it’s 4G.  So are Honolulu, Seattle, Portland, and Philadelphia.  And what Pogue fails to mention is that Wichita Falls is the northern end of a 4G corridor running down through both Dallas and Fort Worth, Waco, and Austin to San Antonio that covers an area with roughly 10 million people.  I guess those don’t count.

This isn’t to say that Sprint’s 4G service isn’t spotty, but … come on.  Be fair.

Let’s get to where the actual issues with 4G service are: I, too, don’t have much experience with the 4G network because I don’t need it.  I tie into the wireless network at home and at work, and when I’m in the car I don’t need a fast data connection because I’m driving.  It does take a while to start up. I don’t know if I can verify the claim that it takes 6 minutes the first time you use it since I was inside a store and everything was running slowly, but it does take an average of 5-10 seconds to connect to the network when you initiate a connection.  I leave mine off because it sucks the life out of the battery even fast than normal …

The battery: … which is my biggest gripe about the EVO.  On a normal day, I leave my house at 6:40 in the morning.  I pick up my co-worker, and we drive in, and we get out of the car over in the garage around 7:15-7:20.  On a normal day, my battery depletes to 90% charge by the time I get out of the car in the garage.  And trust me, at that hour, I’m not calling anyone, nor am I Web surfing on the commute.  It’s in my pocket, sleeping.  That’s 10% gone, right there.

When I was running a workshop a couple of weeks ago, and my laptop was one of the main presentation machines and I needed to use the EVO for Instant Messenging or E-mail, I ran the battery down to 35% the first day and brought my charging cable the rest of the week.  No matter how bad my Instinct got, I never got to the point of needing the charging cable.

Ironically, it was in one of the comments on David Pogue’s interview that I was pointed to Power Manager, which, frankly, should have come installed with the bloody phone.

The full version is $0.99, which was entirely worth it to be able to set power profiles.  Now, with one swipe, when I pull the phone off the charger in the morning, I can set it to “car,” which sets the screen to medium brightness, turns off data sync and Wifi, and turns Bluetooth on so that the phone can connect to my stereo which has hands-free calling.  My “work” setting turns off data sync and Bluetooth, but keeps Wifi on because the campus network is robust, and also simultaneously mutes the ringer and turns on the vibrate function, which I constantly forget to do.  If I were more clever, I could actually set up triggers to do this all automatically, but I’m not.

Anyway, if you’re interested, you can whip out your Android and scan that there bar code to the left and it’ll take you right to Power Manager in the apps market.  There are others out there, I’m told, but I can also report that I downloaded it on Saturday and, when I got to work on Monday, my battery was at 96% instead of the usual 90.  Whatever it’s doing, it’s working.

None of this is to say that I’m not keeping my eye out for a longer life HTC battery, and if HTC had any decency, they’d offer to replace the existing batteries for free since this has been a universal gripe since Day 1.  Not that I’m holding my breath.

Anyway, this is all a longwinded rant.  I really like the EVO.  I think the most important point was made at the beginning: there’s a learning curve with the Androids.  You have to get it to do what you want, and the main choice between an Android and an iPhone is whether you want it all done for you and be unable to change it, or whether you want to figure it out but have the chance to get something more specialized to what you want.  As it is, I’m pretty happy