Sprint HTC Evo, the first afternoon

I have taken the plunge and I am going to try Android on the HTC Evo for a month.

I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of years, before that Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 even before.

I have to admit, I love my iPhone. When I say “love” I mean it’s an irrational emotional feeling towards a device and a platform. So switching off iPhone feels a bit like a divorce. I remember all the good times, but the few bad things are so bad and so unforgivable that it taints the entirety of the relationship.

So want has iPhone done? Well here’s the list of things I want out of life that iPhone just can’t give me right now. (For the purposes of discussion, when I say “iPhone”, I mean the device, software, applications, AT&T, and Apple)

1. AT&T Cell Service is awful. In the places where I live and work, AT&T’s coverage is abysmal, and there is no 3G, only EDGE.

2. iTunes App Store. Yes there are 250,000+ apps in the App Store, but the approval process is frightfully arbitrary. The restrictions I feel stifle innovation. It’s hard to trust the judgment of a company who thinks fart jokes are ok but political jokes are forbidden.

3. Apple has taken a position on Intellectual Property that I feel is contrary to innovation. Steve Jobs has publicly attacked open-source codecs for video claiming that ALL codecs infringe on MPEG-LA, and Apple has sued HTC. Apple should innovate rather than litigate. The culture of secrecy at Apple is disturbing. I do not want to support a company I do not agree with.

4. AT&T has jerked customers around with a bait and switch over unlimited Data on the iPhone and iPad. The have also raised early termination fees, and thread  to sue a customer for contacting the CEA. They also charge mirco-cell users for their own data. Again, these are business practices I do not agree with, and I do not what to support companies that do things like this.

5. iOS 4 and iPhone 4 honestly do not strike me as genuine innovations. Facetime is an attempt to reinvent the skype wheel, poorly. The external issues with skin contact shows poor testing and bad design (most likely from being too secretive). The multitasking functions in iOS 4 are a joke. Yes there are some background abilities, but the software must be re-written to do it, without the ability to control them or for those apps to pass notifications back to the user in a useful way.

6. The inability for Apps on the iPhone to work from a single shared file storage area is a difficult thing to understand.

7. Media. I have 1TB+ of music and movies on a Mac server shared via iTunes. The ability to move those files to and from my iPhone is nice, but the INABILITY to stream those files from the server (like my Apple TV does) is maddening.

So these are my thoughts on my first Afternoon with the HTC EVO

Sprints 3G. WOW! I don’t know how it compares to 3G speeds with the other Cell Carries, but after years of EDGE, getting 2,000Kbps+ is just awesome. It remains to be seen in Sprint has coverage everywhere I go, but I did have seamless coverage from Cookeville to Crossville on i40 and coverage both and Work and Home.

The coolest feature I’ve encountered so far is the voice recognition of Android. Everywhere I can type, I can speak, and it’s very accurate. There is an app in the Android Market called “translate” (it’s free), with this app I can “speak” a phrase into the phone, and then the translation can be spoken via the text-to-speech engine. So I now have a babble fish, or a universal translator, depending on your sci-fi preference.

The HTC “Sense UI” is kinda kludgy. I much prefer to use the stock Android UI. I took time to disable as much of it as I could.

All the “Sprint” apps on the phone reminds me of all the crapware that comes on retail windows PCs. I’ve not used any of it yet, and I doubt I will.

Battery. I’ve not had enough time to evaluate battery life. The new phone had about 50% battery, and that lasted the rest of the afternoon plus some. I charge my phones at night, so when I got to that point today I put the EVO on to charge. We’ll se how it does tomorrow.

Google Voice. My phone has a number, but I didn’t bother learning it. I have a google voice number, and the Google Voice integration is incredible. All of my SMS and voice traffic is coming in and going out over Google voice in a completely seamlessly. I now know why Apple has rejected the Google Voice app from the iTunes store. It puts Apples and AT&Ts voice mail system to shame.

Tomorrow I will check out the Android Market tomorrow to see if I can find programs to replace the ones I have on my iPhone.

I plan on carrying both phones for the duration of the test. I also have an iPad, which ironically has enabled me to break away from iPhone. I know there will be some things which are iOS only, and that’s what my iPad will be used for. So far the only thing that I needed my iPad for that normally would be used by my iPhone is the iTunes remote.

I did have a strange emotional response today to the absence of my iPhone. My pocket space is somewhat limited, so I had to leave my iPhone on a window ledge while on site with a client today. After an hour or so, the iPhone vibrated to let me know I had an email message. I looked over at the window and saw my iPhone laying there, and I felt “sorry” for it, like it was lonely for me.