The world’s fastest Android phone, the HTC EVO from Sprint, may have been overshadowed by Monday’s iPhone 4 news, but this high-speed 4G powerhouse is worthy of attention.
The HTC EVO from Sprint works on the 4G network that runs about three-and-a-half times faster than the
3G network.
The screen, apps and widgets will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has fiddled with the HTC Incredible. The speed will be unfamiliar, though. The phone runs on a 4G network, which, in my test, runs about three-and-a-half times faster than a 3G network. The EVO, which works on both 3G and 4G networks, is $200 with a two-year contract after rebate, and is available online and from Sprint, Best Buy, RadioShack and Wal-Mart.
First, let’s get our definitions clear. In this case, 4G stands for the fourth-generation network(available in 33 cities across the country), not the fourth generation of a handset. It’s the network that brings the speed. But a phone itself has to have the hardware built in to work on a 4G network to use the speed. Even though Apple’s iPhone 4 is the fourth generation of that phone, it doesn’t work on a 4G network. So make sure you have a salesman carefully define terms when you are phone shopping.
The EVO comes with a respectable suite of features. It has a 4.3-inch touch screen with pinch to zoom, and acts as a mobile hot spot, so you can connect up to eight Wi-Fi devices, for an additional $30 a month.
It also comes with a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video chatting. The camera on the back is 8 megapixels with a dual LED flash. It also captures video in 720p high definition, and can play it back on your TV through an HDMI cable. It also has an FM radio, but you can only listen to it using wired headphones; the cable doubles as an antenna.
The phone comes with 1 gigabyte of built-in memory and an 8-gigabyte microSD card, but can support up to 32 gigabytes.
The EVO also has what we’ve come to think of as standard features, like a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack, stereo Bluetooth and GPS.
In my test of the phone, I used the speed-checking Web site Ookla to measure speed, which is possible because current Android phones play some Adobe Flash. I had 4G downloads of 3.61 to 3.86 mbps, compared with 3G downloads of .77 to 1.28 mbps with the same phone. To put that speed in perspective, a 30-minute video on iTunes is about 300 megabytes. On a 3G network it would have taken me four to five minutes to download. On 4G it would take about one to 1.3 minutes.
I should point out that when the phone was on Wi-Fi, it was even faster, averaging 7.2 mbps. And using Wi-Fi doesn’t count against a data plan.
Stephanie Vinge-Walsh, a Sprint spokeswoman, said Ookla and other such sites were largely inaccurate. She said the company used a “scientific” measure, which generally finds speeds one to two gigs faster than Ookla did, though not always. But she agreed that the speed I measured was within the expected range.
Putting the phone to the test repeatedly with streaming video from “ABC Mobile Originals” in the featured TV videos found the EVO falling short. The shows were slow to load, occasionally froze in the middle and returned error messages saying I had no network connection, and “Sorry, this channel is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later or contact Customer Care.” The company said it was most likely an application issue.
These glitches aside, the phone was smooth, fun to use and over 4G, fast. Maybe even good enough to buy in a 3G market.
A 4G network is available in these cities: Atlanta; Milledgeville, Ga.; Honolulu; Maui, Hawaii; Boise, Idaho; Chicago; Baltimore; Kansas City, Mo.; Las Vegas; Charlotte, Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem, Raleigh, Cary, Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C.; Portland and Salem, Ore.; Philadelphia; Harrisburg, Lancaster, Reading, and York, Pa.; Dallas/Ft. Worth; Houston; San Antonio; Abilene, Amarillo, Austin, Corpus Christi, Killeen/Temple, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, Waco, and Wichita Falls, Tex.; Seattle; and Bellingham, Wash.
Sprint says it plans to add more cities to 4G this year, including Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, St. Louis and Washington.
[via NYT]
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3g network,
android,
htc evo,
iphone 4
