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Sprint Unveils HTC Evo 4G Super Phone
adeelarshad82 writes "Sprint dropped a bombshell on the CTIA Wireless trade show by unveiling the most powerful Google Android smartphone ever seen in the USA, the WiMAX-powered Evo 4G. The phone runs Android 2.1 on a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8650 chipset along with a helpful 1GB of built-in memory and 512MB of RAM, which is assisted by a MicroSD slot supporting up to 32GB cards. It swaps between EVDO Rev. A, WiMAX and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g on demand. The phone is dominated by a 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 65,000-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel unit on the front. The camera also records 720p, high-def video, which it can play through an HDMI out jack on the bottom. The Evo 4G weighs 170g and measures 120.5 mm by 67 mm by 13 mm. It's expected to hit the market in the summer."
"It swaps between EVDO Rev. A, WiMAX and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g on demand"
Does this apply to calls as well as data? If so it is even more awesome than I originally thought.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A phone that records 720p video and plays it out via an HDMI jack? WHY?
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Looks really cool and feature packed, but I wonder if it will last a resonable amount of time on a single charge? If you ask me only in the last year or so have 3G radios become efficient enough to be usefull daylong in something like a phone. If WiMax/"4G" is like early 3G headsets it will likely last an unreasonably short amount of time on a charge. But hey if I'm wrong sign me up!
Actually the "4G" refers to the price. I hope they have a payment plan.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
From the article - "The Evo 4G will swap between 3G and WiMAX for data depending on what's available; it will make all voice calls over Sprint's CDMA 1X network."
The expected battery life is 20 minutes of standby or 5 minutes of talk. A replacement high-capacity battery adds 104g to the weight of the unit, 20mm to the depth, and extends standby time to 68 minutes and talk time to over 10 minutes.
What? That doesn't even..I can't...you...
HDMI is a plug. Youtube has a matter replicator in my house now?
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to put it simply, it's a game changer for Sprint.
1. What is the battery life.
2. What is the price.
I'm slightly concerned that this will be like those Japanese or European phones that have a huge laundry list of features, but skimp out on basic usability and essentials like good radio paths and battery life; plus half of the features don't work properly (camera has a lot of pixels, but a worthless lens; screen is dim or difficult to read; interface requires 15 button presses to do anything; front camera can't be used for teleconferencing because the carrier disabled that feature, etc...). There's a definite concern that this will be priced at the "enthusiast" level as well, meaning almost nobody can afford it or the plan required to drive it.
The ball is in your court Sprint. What are you going to do with it?
I read the internet for the articles.
In many confidence games, the 'con man' will use 'shills' or assistants who pretend to be independently interested in the swindle or scam. In modern marketing, it is fairly common for companies to identify natural leaders and people with influence, and offer to pay them to fake spontaneous endorsement of the product. Given those facts, any news or commentary relating to commercially available products must be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
FTA:
"It works as a Wi-Fi hotspot, supporting up to 8 devices;"
Wow! That's insane, considering that laptop wireless sharing is only now just becoming mainstream.
How many people will buy this phone, and ditch dsl, cable, etc? Smaller than any dsl or cable box, uses less power too I'd bet.
Perhaps you'll find more utility in the tools that you purchase if you stop thinking about them in terms of what a marketer told you and what its potential actually is.
Too bad there's no hardware keyboard on this beast. I can't stand using touchscreen keyboards. Hopefully this isn't becoming the norm.
No it's not. If you'd like a mobile telephone I suggest a less capable model such as any of the cheaper motorola models, such as the i776. If you are looking for a PDA or mobile media center which happens to also have cellphone capabilities then this is probably for you.
Slower than a Cray. Less storage than a ZFS SAN. Lame.
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That's true, but regardless of whether or not this is meant as advertising, the introduction of a phone like this into the US market is also certainly newsworthy. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
silly, no one talks on the phone anymore. you use a telephone to read email, twitter, facebook and the rest of the internets
We aren't calling Dell's latest machines "super computers" either, so there's really no need to name new phones with up-to-date specs "super phones". It's technology. New devices with faster hardware and more features are going to come out. Every new phone will be a "super phone", because that's how the market works. This phone will be deprecated in a year or so, just like every other IT toy.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Let me clarify the situation for you: every single story on slashdot can be qualified as advertisement. Every. Single. One. That story about WoW reaching 10M+ players? Advertisement for Blizzard. That story about some guy building a bender robot? Advertising for said guy. That story about a fork in the Linux kernel? Advertising for Linux.
Pointing out that something getting front-page billing on Slashdot is good advertisement for said something is like pointing out the Sun is shining on the Earth: true, but not really useful information. Now, if you would have evidence that Sprint paid CmdrTaco to run this story, this would be an entirely different proposition. However, until you do, you're little more than a blowhard who likes playing Captain Obvious.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
That should make you question the accuracy of the rest of the entire article.
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It is nice to see phones that are adding front cameras. Asian phones have had this for years allowing for video chatting with the handset.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of wireless in this country. The iPhone 3G was the phone to own. Then the other guy came out with the HTC Hero. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the iPhone 3Gs. That's 3G speeds and a fucking compass. For orienteering. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to 4G. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling the 3G and a fucking compass. Orienteering or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to 5G.
every single story on slashdot can be qualified as advertisement. Every. Single. One.
So by that logic, a story about a congressional hearing is an advertisement for that hearing? A story about someone's rights being violated or a major patent lawsuit is an advertisement? Wiktionary says that an advertisement is "A commercial solicitation designed to sell some commodity, service or similar." That sounds a lot like this story, but nothing at all like a quote from Torvalds or a move by the FCC, which is the kind of info /. made it's name on.
That said, you are actually more and more right every day, in the sense that slashdot has become a big target for viral marketing, which is probably how this story got posted. If one thinks of slashdot as a bulletin board, one forgets that there are editors. If one looks at it as a news aggregator, one gets a little closer to the truth, but since news in general becomes more and more viral every day, it's even hard to say that much. Basically its a sounding board for whatever the editors think is cool. Apparently they think this phone is cool. I think they are spending too much time on this kind of crap and ignoring other, more important stories. But that's just my opinion...
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Fascinating! You seem to be implying that there is more than one!! And I had always thought they were just a myth. What truly amazing times we live in, where such people live right alongside the rest of us, and we don't even know they're there!
Tell me, is it true that you all have fingertips as pointed as sharpened pencils, which allow you to actual use the OS? Or is it, like my friend believes, that you are all atoning for some great, and unspeakable crime? Perhaps you were AOL developers in your past life?
:-P
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Hehe.
Yes, we do keep a low profile. We usually hang out at sites like xda-developers where we share the latest reg fixes for our operators' crappy crap-ware infested ROMs. Some of us go even further and learn how to cook our own ROMs.
As for our fingers, it's quite amazing what one can adapt themselves to. There seem to be two groups who have taken two distinct evolutionary paths. The first, the "touch friendly app seeker" group, trolls around the forums seeking finger friendly third-party apps to replace every part of the OS that they commonly use. These people find varying amounts of success. Some claim to have no problems, while others constantly find fault with the solutions they've found and are in never-ending quest for touch friendly nirvana. The other group, the one I fall into, have developed the ability to accurately hit areas the size of a few millimeters with our fingers, using the exact amount of pressure needed. We still appreciate touch friendly replacements - as long as they work perfectly. If they don't, we are content to interact with the built-in OS. Our girlfriends and wives would probably benefit from our uber "touching" skills - if we weren't all constantly trying to fix our god damned phones.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem.
Odd, I could say the same thing about your comment.
You seem emotionally invested in this discussion. Your comment doesn't even make any sense. I didn't make excuses for any engineering flaw in anything because I was not defending any engineering, just pointing out a well known problem.
So enforcing uniform standards is a bad thing?
This is a straw man argument.
Every OS and it's dog has a recommended way of doing things which always scatters things across the file system.
That is the case with legacy OS's and versions of some OS's but it is not good engineering. OS X, for example, stores entire apps in a single, special folder. The only thing outside that folder are shared frameworks and config files (which are cascading and needed for upgrading and remote applications. One of the hardest parts of using SE Linux is that Linux application in general don't have a simple location all the time, so allowing them to modify their own files but not anything else can take significant expertise.
What Google has done in this case is introduce a limitation that exacerbates that problem even more.
Linux and OSX have similar systems.
You clearly aren't familiar with OS X and some Linux variants that have been more recently engineered to have more sane practices.
Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
This I think is where you misunderstood me. You can distribute as a single package but what you should be doing is creating a proper install for Android rather then just dumping it wherever (I.E. putting your large art assets into /SDCard/YourGame).
Applications should be distributed as single bundles and stored as single bundles. This makes it much much easier to transfer applications, run applications remotely, install and uninstall applications cleanly, upgrade applications cleanly, restrict applications for security purposes, and backup applications. Android not only did not provide a cleaner and more compact installation that the average Linux distro, but actually made the install messier with limitations on where apps can be run from, resulting in applications being spread out more. Now you can have applications fail to run if either of two storage types fails.
It's a flaw and Google knows it's a flaw and people are working on fixing the flaw. I don't see how anyone can rationally conclude otherwise.