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.
Performance - The HTC EVO 3D is very fast. The Dual Core CPU inside the skin does a great job of running things. We had no issues with applications launching even bulky ones like Skype or Qik were very snappy (with the exception of some poor video performance. We also had no issues loading up images of video files that were saved directly to the EVO 3D. Browsing was also good using the built in browser although I must say that I miss using the Atomic Browser from my days with the iPhone. Still there is one item that I have with almost any Android phone and that is the fact that I can view flash video live in my browser without needing to use a translation service. Moving on to Audio quality and performance we found the call quality to be a little off when we first started working with the EVO 3D. The volume in just about all calls would fluctuate making it difficult to understand the person on the other end. No one that we spoke to reported issues with the quality of our speech. Most said that the phone sounded clean and clear. Just to be on the safe side we ran a firmware and a PRI update which seemed to clear some of this up, but occasionally we still encounter this issue. The multi-media audio quality was excellent; whether we were watching movies using the Watch App or viewing a movie that was saved onto the miniSD card we found the audio easy to hear and understand. There is even an SRS option that helps to add some depth to the audio. We had no issues listening to music or audio books using the EVO 3D. Video performance was good with a few exceptions. One of the problems that I had was that the video would flicker and turn off while viewing 3D pictures or movies. This at first appeared to be tied to the screen time out but we still ran into this with the screen time out set to never. As is stands right now we do not have a real answer to why this is happening. It is very interesting to note that when this did happen and we went to log back into the phone we could see that the 3D Display was still active. The second layer was clearly visible as an iridescent glow under the keypad. This is something that HTC and or Sprint will want to fix pretty soon.Battery Life - Battery life is one of the reasons we were not one of the first to release our review of this product. You see the batteries that are shipped with these products were not fully charged from the factory. As such when you charge it up the first time you are also not charging the phone all the way. When we first ran our EVO 3D with what we thought was a full charge we got about 6 hours out of it. That is simply terrible. Then we followed a recommendation we found on a couple of sites. We fully charged and discharged our phone five times. This meant from 100% down to the phone shutting itself off and then trying to power it on until we got nothing (the charging all over again). After this was done we found that we could get between 12-16 hours depending on the usage and signal strength. Obviously things like 3D video, gaming, or using the camera in 3D drained the battery much faster, but still we were much happier with this battery life than we were with the EVO. We have to note that 12-16 hours is still much less than many other devices on the market right now, but it is an improvement.
