Not too long ago I made a comment about the iPhone losing ground in the smart phone market. Not too long after that I started looking at the mobile phone market; not because I was trying to find some information about on smartphone purchases, but because I was interested in a new phone. The phone I was replacing is one of the most popular Android based phones on the Market. It was actually one that many people went to after the issues with the iPhone 4 (the grip of death). In fact that is how I ended up with my HTC EVO 4G from Sprint. The phone that caught my eye was another HTC phone. This was the HTC EVO 3D. This is a dual core high performance phone with a 3D Screen that does not need glasses to view. So I went out and picked one up, let’s see if it was worth the money and time.
Features -Ok here we are going to cover some fairly obvious things as well as some things that we found out later after playing around with the EVO 3D. Of course the biggest feature on this phone is the 3D. After all it is not called the EVO 3D just because it sounds cool. As we mentioned above the camera on the EVO 3D is a stereoscopic 3D camera/camcorder. It uses the dual lenses to create a stereoscopic 3D image for display. You have two options for saving these images; one is the .mpo file (the default) and the other is .jps. You also have the option to capture 3D video which is saved as .mp4 files. When you take your first 3D photograph you are going to be very impressed. Then you will notice that the colors are not quite right. The CMOS sensors used lean toward blue (well actually a lack of yellow and magenta). You can correct this a little by changing the white balance but really HTC or Sprint needs to come up with a fix for this. The good news is that this is a camera on a phone; because of this most of the processing uses a software layer that runs on the phone’s CPU. This means that someone else can write a camera application for the EVO 3D which corrects these problems if they chose to. We have posted a few samples on our forum for those of you with 3D Vision. *We would have liked to have posted screen shots of this but the EVO 3D does not come with a screen shot function and none of the non-root apps we found were any good*Watch -Watch is something new to me, it is an online video library that allows you to rent or buy movies right through your phone. To get you interested (and to help show off the power of the EVO 3D) they give you one free movie. This is the 3D version of the Green Hornet. While I found this Seth Rogan film entertaining, I have to say that it is a little on the cheap side considering some of the other (and much more impressive) 3D Movies they could have given.Wireless Media Sharing -Remember how we told you that there is no microHDMI port on the EVO 3D? Well you do not need one. The EVO 3D is capable of streaming media to any DLNA enabled TV or PC (which is a lot of them). You have to do this over your WiFi network. Of course you might have a few issues playing some of the video content directly from the phone. We found that the system takes a very long time to buffer content. To watch a single 2 minute video took a little over 3 minutes to buffer. I could not imagine trying to buffer a 2 hour movie. Bluetooth transfer -This is actually a very cool feature but might be of limited use. Theoretically it is supposed to connect to your phone Via Bluetooth and pull your contacts, calendar and some additional information. In practice it is a little more limited. I was actually very surprised that the only thing I was able to sync from my EVO was the contacts. Video Calling -The EVO 3D has a front mounted 1.3 MP camera that is ideal for video calling. To facilitate this Sprint has thrown in Qik as their software of choice. This is not bad software for the most part but if you do not have a VERY good signal you can look forward to choppy video and at times no video at all. There are other applications available from the Android Market but they all have this issue to one degree or another when you are stuck on 3G or are in an area of poor reception. Other odds and ends -There are other items about the EVO 3D that make it stand out but none are really features (at least not the way we think about it). As it is a Sprint phone you get the usual Sprint shovelware (Sprint Zone, Sprint TV, Sprint Radio, NASCAR etc). You also get a few HTC add-ins like HTC Hub and HTC like. HTC also preloaded a single 3D game, sort of, you get the demo of Spiderman 3D. To get the full game you are going to have to shell out $4.99. These are nice little extras but nothing that is really going to make or break the deal.
