HTC Evo 4G LTE mobile review

The HTC Evo 4G LTE might share a lot of specs in common with the One X on AT&T, but its design is totally different. With its black body and red accents, you might mistake it for a Verizon phone; it looks an awful lot like the newly announced HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE. It holds onto the Evo design legacy, however, with a bright red kickstand. You flip the kickstand out and set your Evo on a table for some hands-free video watching. The kickstand is a little difficult to open, however. You'll need some nails to get it out. The kickstand divides the Evo's battery cover, which is part glossy black plastic and part matte, soft-touch rubber. Measuring 5.3-by-2.7-by-0.35 inches, the Evo is slightly smaller than the One X, which measures 5.3-by-2.8-by-0.4 inches. The Evo is an ounce heavier, at 4.7 ounces, than the One X (4.6 ounces). The Evo has a 4.7-inch 1280-by-720 HD pixel display with IPS (In Plane Switching) technology. We loaded the Evo up with a few test photos we use across phones to test display quality. These images include a colorscale test, a grayscale test, and photos of people. In our colorscale test, I could detect some oversaturation as the colors bled into one another (see sample photo). In the portrait photos, skin tones had a ruddy look--another sign of oversaturation. Details appeared sharp, however, as did text. Android 4.0 with HTC Sense HTC Sense--the manufacturer's user interface over Android--has garnered a mixed response from consumers and tech journalists alike. And Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) has, by far, the best-looking interface of any version of Android. I understand why manufacturers slapped on overlays in the early days of Android: The underlying interfaces were ugly. HTC Sense is undeniably pretty. But its animations and colorful widgets have a tendency to bog down the operating system. Perhaps my idea that manufacturers might leave Android 4.0 alone and just add a few customized widgets was just wishful thinking. To HTC's credit, Sense 4.0 is much subtler than previous versions of the interface. The company has cleared out many unnecessary icons and text that cluttered older versions of Sense. You can still pinch the screen to see all seven of your homescreens, and you get that handy customizable lock screen that we saw with Sense 3.0. Still, Android purists might take offense to a few changes. The Recent Apps UI has been tweaked in typical Sense fashion. Rather than displaying your apps or websites as a list with thumbnails, it displays them as pages that flip as you flick through them. The Sense widgets are a bit too busy and garish for my liking, but you can easily remove them. HTC Sense also makes some very basic tasks more difficult than they should be. For example, to change the phone's wallpaper, you have to dig through multiple menus in the Settings. Changing the wallpaper in vanilla Android 4.0 is as simple as holding down on the homescreen. The Evo 4G LTE comes with a significant amount of carrier and manufacturer-added software, but that seems to be the norm these days. You can disable some of these so they don't show up in your apps menu. Annoyingly, you can't disable either the Sprint Music Plus player or the Sprint Zone. The Evo phones have always been Sprint's strongest offering, and the Evo 4G LTE is no exception. From its beautiful design to the versatile camera to the fast performance, this is Sprint's best phone--and one of the best Android phones available. But without LTE, it feels as if it is not quite living up to its potential. That Sprint is releasing LTE phones (the Evo, the LG Viper, and the Galaxy Nexus) without an actual 4G LTE network in place is a bit frustrating. While the company has disclosed the initial six cities for launch (Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City and San Antonio), it has not said when these networks will turn on. And unless you live in one of those cities, you'll find it hard to get excited about LTE. Sprint's 3G network feels painfully slow, too, especially when you compare it to other carriers' 4G networks. Sprint has announced that it will release 15 more 4G devices, most of them handsets. Unless you are 100 percent committed to the Evo legacy or are dying to upgrade your phone, I'd hold off on buying the Evo until you know that you'll get LTE or have seen what else is available before locking into a two-year contract.