HTC Evo Design 4G Review: A 4G Phone for the Budget-Conscious Buyer

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Streams media to other devices ended Wi-Fi
Very sturdy design

Cons

Poor battery life
Sense overlay uses up most of the phone's RAM

Our Finding of fact

The HTC Evo Design is a good phone, but HTC's Signified cover fundament be a capacious resource hog from time to tim.

The HTC Evo Purpose 4G ($100 with a new two-year Sprint contract, as of November 9, 2011) is the smallest phone in Sprint's Evo line. It's also one of the more affordable Evo models currently available on the carrier, just the phone has a few issues surrounding the HTC Sense overlay.

Purpose

The Evo Design 4G, like-minded other HTC phones, feels well crafted. The brushed-nerve nerve brings a drunk-quality bare to the French telephone, patc the soft-no-good backing makes the Evo Design 4G comfortable to hold. Though information technology sports a good-looking 4-in WVGA display, the Evo Design 4G never felt likewise bulky, and it primed comfortably in my jeans pocket As I walked more or less.

One interesting thing about the Evo Design 4G is that, different with early Evo models, the entire back plate does not arrive off. To rag the assault and battery or MicroSD card, you motivation to remove a small panel on the bottom uncomplete of the ring. The venire detaches relatively well, but putting it back on can be a little of a provoke.

Carrying into action

Powered by a 1.2GHz single-core Snapdragon processor, the Evo Invention 4G privy handle near of the apps and games you power throw at it. While games such as Minecraft or Cordy won't run equally fluidly as they would on a dual-core earpiece, fewer-demanding games like Wroth Birds Rio should have no issues.

In my tests, iindividual apps ran fine, but things started to get messy when I opened to a higher degree Little Jo or five. Although the Evo Design 4G has 768MB of RAM, the HTC Good sense overlay ties leading well-nig of it. Disregarding how many apps I closed or killed, I couldn't get the phone to use fewer than 400MB at any once. For people who wear't use more one or two apps simultaneously, this won't be a great deal of an issue–merely the fact that the overlay hogs that much system memory board remains unforgivable.

The Evo Design 4G is a dual-striation phone that supports both CDMA and GSM connections. That flexibility is useful if you are in an area with low CDMA insurance coverage simply great GSM reception. Victimization GSM networks can toll you excess, though, so you should consult your carrier advance lest you rack up sky-high roaming charges.

Call character over Sprint's voice network here in San Francisco was a mixed bag. While the calls I placed were free of any static or reverb, audio levels varied. One 2nd I could hear the another individual just close-grained, and the next, they sounded A if they were whispering into their mike. The mic on the Evo Design did a good job of filtering out background noises, but on occasion it would pick finished wind that arrive at it at once.

As the mention implies, the Evo Blueprint 4G is a 4G phone, running connected Dash's WiMax network. In our endmost inexact of network speed tests, we ranked Sprint's WiMax network as the slowest of the four major carriers (below T-Mobile). In my personal unofficial speed tests, I managed to contract upload speeds of around 1083 kilobits per second, but only a disappointing 703 kbps for downloads. I got those results in an orbit with a strong WiMax signal; you'll see varying speeds dependant on the region you are in.

Battery liveliness was equally disappointing. After merely 2 hours of moderate use (with the default settings, and with no downloaded apps running in the background), I managed to drain the battery from fully charged down to only 70 percent. Once I began to download apps, I sawing machine the battery drop some other 30 percent from in that respect. You'll definitely want to have a charger on hand down for this phone, especially if you are the type who browses the Web Oregon downloads very much of apps on mobile devices. I'll update this section with some hard Book of Numbers once we arrange the Evo Design 4G through our official assault and battery-life tests.

Software

The Evo Blueprint 4G runs Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) with the HTC Sense 3.0 user interface over it. You gravel entree to few HTC-built features such as Leap (which lets you view all of your home screens at erstwhile) and the quick launcher in the lock screen. The quick launcher allows you to start upfield the camera, email, messages, or dialer apps without having to unlock the phone number 1. You can customize these shortcuts to distributor point to any app that you sustain installed; they'atomic number 75 handy for rapidly checking your text messages or email.

Aside from the Sense UI, the Evo Contrive 4G comes preloaded with a couple of Dash-branded applications (TV, NASCAR, TeleNav, and the like), every of which you bathroom uninstall if you put on't wish them.

Media

Considering the headphone's slow information speeds, I was surprised to find that the HD video I streamed to the Evo Design 4G came out artifact-free. The 960-past-540-pixel, WVGA video display showed videos with bully lucidity, and games looked equally colorful as a loge of crayons. The HTC music player is miles ahead of the stock Android one, and offers extras such as SRS audio frequency enhancements and a cool-looking Cover Run over-esque way of presenting songs in an album. The speaker on the rear of the phone pumps out decent substantial, but produces a hint of static at high volumes.

The Evo Design 4G can stream audio, video, Oregon photos to DLNA-lamblike devices (much arsenic smart TVs or PlayStation 3 consoles) that divvy up the Lapplander Wi-Fi connective. IT's a great feature for sharing your media with a large group of citizenry, but you'll want to keep your speech sound blocked to a power rootage so that the battery doesn't die in the middle of moving a movie for your friends.

Camera

Evo Designing 4G test shot

The likes of most modern smartphones, the Evo Design 4G sports some front-facing and rear-lining cameras. The front-veneer 1.3-megapixel camera, meant for use with television-calling applications like Qik or Tango, produced surprisingly clear video in my tests.

The rear 5-megapixel camera comes with a basic photo editor. Information technology replicated colors well, simply images could have been a bit sharpy. The Evo Blueprint 4G is capable of recording in 720p, too, but my videos suffered from a mild lag when I panned the photographic camera. Nevertheless, the camera is serviceable enough for snapping everyday photos or catching a quick clip for YouTube.

Bottom Business line

For Dash customers on a budget, it'll be hard to decide betwixt the HTC Evo Purpose 4G and like-priced Samsung Nexus S 4G. If you want a slenderly more powerful central processor, and you're in love with the HTC Sense overlay (even if IT is a resource hog), then perk up the Evo Blueprint 4G. If you would like to have an unmodified version of Mechanical man, go bad with the Link S 4G. Either way, you'll be getting a 4G phone that didn't price you an gir and a ramification.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/478187/htc_evo_design_4g_review_a_4g_phone_for_the_budget_conscious_buyer.html

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