Many people who know me both online and off will know that I’ve been somewhat of a diehard webOS user for the last two years – since Palm came out with the first Palm Pre in June of 2009 and I picked one up on the day it launched on Sprint. Since then I got to know many of my fellow webOS users and many webOS developers through Twitter, podcasts, meetups, and the Developer Day event in New York last year. In fact I’ll be heading to the Baltimore meetup this Saturday to meet up with some of these great people and to get a look at the Touchpad (which I’ve yet to go to seek out at a store).
Despite my love of the community, a couple of weeks ago I traded in my trusty Palm Pre 2 (“FrankenPre”) for an…. shudder… Android phone! The newly released HTC Evo 3D. This phone boasts some of the best specs in terms of hardware, including a 3D screen for viewing video and stills in 3D, as well as two cameras that can actually take said video and stills.
While some may consider this “disloyalty” to a cause (that of webOS), my reasons were mostly financial. I’ve been a Sprint customer just about as long as I’ve been a Palm smartphone customer, and frankly their prices are hard to beat. But also I’m tied to some degree by the fact that I’m on a family plan, with some of those lines not transferable (without fee) until September. Sure, I could have waited till then, but I like Sprint for other reasons as well (they aren’t quite as monopolistic-minded as their larger brethren, and don’t donate to political causes or candidates I disagree with).
Aside from the financial aspects, I’ve been continuously disappointing with how sluggish things have been since HP took Palm over (not that they were speedy to begin with). There was so much talk about how HP would save webOS because of it’s huge size. “Scale, scale, scale!” they chanted. And yet it took them a year to come out with a tablet that seems to be a generation behind at least in terms of hardware. Their flagship Pre3 phone (which, while a spec improvement over the Pre 2 and Veer still lags behind many current Android offerings) now looks to be delayed from its targeted summer release to “the fall” if reports are to be believed. There was so much waiting and hope that HP would produce something impressive, but from the February event onward, there seem to have been so many bumps that it was getting difficult to maintain much hope. I’ve been through so much of these dark times with the platform, part of me simply needed a break, a rest. I think many webOS faithful would understand the term “exhausted” when used in referring to being a webOS user. Not to say there wasn’t a lot of fun and excitement too, but if nothing else, it was a bit too much of a roller coaster ride!
I still with webOS and HP/Palm the best with it. I hope it quickly grabs the foothold that so far has remained illusive, but this time around I wanted to watch from a bit farther of a vantage point, so as not to avoid that queasy feeling that I got it seemed every other day when being a full member of the community.
With that out of the way, I thought I would jump into some initial impressions of the Evo 3D that I’ve had for the past two weeks.
Hardware
In general my sense is that the hardware is very solid. It doesn’t feel cheap or plasticky, and so far I’ve not heard of others having developed any hardware issues. It’s only been out a couple of weeks, but this hasn’t stopped other phones from developing problems in this short a period.
Not having a physical keyboard is difficult for someone like myself who’s had one for the last 8 years on one device or another, but not insurmountable, and really I think cuts down on the potential problems that come with sliding mechanisms not to mention keys that are being pressed many, many times each per day. So far I’ve only played with the standard Android keyboard and it’s mostly effective with it’s predictive functionality. I tried Swype on a different Android phone I was playing with a while ago and never could quite get the hang of it, but there are many alternative Android keyboards out there and I’m sure one of them (if not many) would allow me to become more efficient at typing.
The phone is big! At least compared to the Pre and Pre 2. I have an Otterbox case on it, which admittedly ads even more bulk. It is difficult to one-hand the thing, especially for someone with smaller hands like myself, and this for me is reasonably important, but I suppose something I’m going to have to sacrifice for having such a large screen.
As most reviews point out, the Evo 3D is fast! This is both hardware and software-related, I suppose, but it’s normally credited to the tremendous processing power of the dual-core 1.2Ghz Snapdragon processor . Generally there is no or very little lag to doing anything. Really the only waiting is for stuff to download, not anything as far as displaying stuff that’s already on the phone. Restarting the phone takes maybe a minute or a minute and a half max.
The screen is qHD (960×540) and is pretty bright, except outside in sunlight, where it’s kind of hard to see. Not much else to say, everything I’ve viewed on it, from pictures to web pages, etc., looks great.
There are actually three cameras on the phone, a front-facing (1.3MP) one meant for video-conferencing (which I haven’t used yet) and two (5MP) cameras on the back meant for both 2D and 3D still image and video capture. I have only taken a couple of 3D images and 1 3D video with the phone, so I can’t really vouch for quality quite yet, although having a dedicated camera button is definitely a lot nicer than having to hit a button on the screen. The thing that would really make it nice would be an optical viewfinder so you don’t even have to use the screen, but I think that’s not a feature we’ll see any time soon on a phone!
The battery is one that is a good deal larger than what comes with most devices, rated at 1750mah. There are lots of ways to drain the battery, and 3D is of course one of them, the 4G (Wimax) radio another, and bluetooth yet another. I haven’t done a great deal of testing, I really try to keep it charging whenever possible, as I’ve done with most of the phones I’ve had. I’ve found that battery life ratings are in general all across the board, not just for this phone, but for almost any phone. Mainly this is due to to how a person uses the phone, but I think another aspect that’s probably even more a factor but not mentioned nearly enough is simply what kind of cell reception one gets. I’ve had phones that could make it 20 hours or more at home die after 6 hours at the office (uncharged) because reception was so poor. I’ve often gotten extended batteries because I know I’m liable not to always be either at the office, at home, or in the car, but so far it hasn’t become an issue. In fact, even with trying to keep it charging much of the time, there are points where hours will go by without charging and the battery meter seems to rarely go beyond what looks like 50%, but again, take that with a big YMMV!
Tweaking
Most people could care less about “tweaking” their phones. For those people, iPhones are great because it’s designed for people who don’t want to tweak much, they just want something that’s designed well for most people to be usable. Apple is good at that. But for some of us, it’s fun to modify our OS (whether on the desktop or phone) to enhance efficiency as well as aesthetics.
Many people call Android “clunky” compared to iOS and webOS, and while I can understand that perception, after using the Evo 3D for two weeks, I don’t think it’s really fair. Perhaps out of the box with plain vanilla Android, and maybe not even the latest version (Gingerbread), Android is not as elegant, and actually requires you to go into settings to change things more than I’d like, rather than having apps to do the same thing. But Android also makes up for this in it’s “widgets” which are essentially pieces of live app functionality running on it’s screens (without having to open the apps themselves).
With HTC Sense or any of a variety of 3rd party launchers (none of which require rooting), you can get things working in a way that provides a great degree of ease of use and functionality, and suited to almost any taste. There’s an application I’ve become enamored with called Wave Launcher which adds a webOS-like draggable launchbar, infinitely more configurable than webOS’s ever was, even with Homebrew patches.
Speaking of Homebrew, much of what I loved about webOS was really Homebrew – the ability to tweak the phone in ways that Palm didn’t initially provide for (not to mention the overclocking without which the original Pre was almost unusable). Without these patches, webOS was an elegant but pretty limited mobile operating system, not even providing a way to add new launcher pages until 2.0. Although 2.0 allowed for more customization of the launcher, it also locked some things down so that a lot of the patches no longer worked to tweak things like icon size. My point is that on both platforms, the out-of-the-box system is only going to suit a select group of users, and most who consider themselves ‘power users’ are going to take to tweaking things pretty quickly. I’ve never written patches, but as an avid consumer of them, it feels like there are some that on Android would require rooting, while a lot would not - you simply download an app of one kind or another to change things more to your liking, or just change something in the built-in settings, or use the integrated UI of the Android screens which are inherently more configurable than webOS’s. In that sense it’s even easier to tweak Android than webOS, albeit perhaps not as emotionally satisfying 
Synergy
A word about synergy, since it’s relevant to the webOS perspective. Android has it’s own system of Synergy that includes your various online social media accounts, Gmail, Exchange, etc. Personally I find it just as effective, perhaps even moreso in some areas, than webOS’s Synergy. Synergy was probably the “killer app” for me in convincing me to switch to webOS in the first place, and while HP/Palm still touts it as one of their selling points, I don’t see how it is effectively different from what you get on Android at this point.
Software:
Not much to say here, the catalogs for the two platforms vary dramatically, not just in the number of apps, but in the offerings of big name apps. If you need something on Android, it’s likely to be found. With webOS, this still isn’t the case, unfortunately.
3D:
I guess it’s not too surprising that there’s been a lot of criticism of the 3D aspect of the Evo. It’s really both Sprint and HTC’s fault for marketing it with such an emphasis and hype around that one feature. On the other hand, as many have noted in various reviews, it is one of many aspects of this phone, and one that you can simply avoid by not taking or looking at 3D video or images..
And while some may consider 3D a “gimmick” I don’t. I consider it a feature that still has more potential than real usefulness. My main issue is being able to transfer the image or video to a larger screen so more than just one person at a time can view it. When we all (or a big chunk of us) have monitors or tv’s that can view this stuff natively, then it will be a different stoyr, but even without that, it does add a great deal of visual interest to both stills and videos. Sometimes it looks a little cheesy, but sometimes it really does add to the feeling of reality. I’m wondering if this is something that our eyes simply need to get used to. I’m sure that the early color TV’s and even photos were scoffed at by purists for adding colors that were not true representations of real life, but rather garish faximilies, making the image less artistic and more of a “gimmick.” This was probably due in part to an immature technology but also due eyes that were used to seeing things in black and white. I wonder if there’s similar phenomenon going on with 3D and our eyes still need years, perhaps even a decade or more to adjust to an image that carries more depth. I also wonder if it’s just a subjective thing. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it makes their eyes or head hurt, feel queesy, etc. But I’ve never had that experiece, even watching 3D video for upwards of 20 minutes streight (the Green Hornet movie that comes with the phone).
Did I miss anything? If so, please add your own additions (or questions) below!
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