notANON

Don’t get me wrong, I love my new phone but here are a few of the things I DON’T love about it that I’ve found in the last few days.  In no particular order, here is my list of nitpicks:

My iPod Touch browser seems quicker – With a 1GHz Snapdragon, I was expecting big things.  It’s not bad at all but it doesn’t blow away my 2G iPod Touch.  That being said, the screen on the EVO DOES blow away the one on the touch.  I’d expect this much though because it’s a newer device.

My iPod keyboard seems smarter – The problem is that the Android keyboard thinks it’s smarter.  It tries to do more auto correction and completion than the iPod does.  There may be a way to tweak some of this behavior but I haven’t looked that deep yet.

4G coverage sucks – at least it is in my area yet I’m still charged $10/mo extra for it.  This was NOT disclosed to me at the time I reserved the phone.  I only found out shortly before I activated the phone.  Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to reconnect to 4G very consistantly.  What I mean is that when I first connec to 4G, it will sometimes connect but even in an area where the signal is strong, once the 4G drops, I’ve yet to see it reconnect on it’s own.

I was under the impression that the mobile hotspot would be a free feature – Stupid me.  Why would I possibly expect them to give away a feature that they can charge for?

4G was supposed to work simultaneously with voice – It was my understanding that I would be able to surf the web or run a mobile hotspot simultaneously with a voice call.

You have to have 4G on to use the mobile hotspot – This really kind of sucks since the 4G service is currently so spotty around here.  I thought my wife would FINALLY be able to replace her ancient flip phone and her Verizon Mifi with this one device.  Not today…

Speedtest fail – When I ran the mobile hotspot and did a speedtest from my iPod Touch, I got 16Kbps down and 892kbps up.  BOTH of these scores are absolutely pitiful but the 16kbps is worse than the lousy T-mobile GPRS aircard I got stuck in a contract with for a year.  I though THAT was bad but at least it was dependable and had good coverage.

Sense UI lacks refinement – The HTC Sense UI is very good and has features that put the IOS to shame BUT it’s not quite as polished.  One example is when I try to thumb between homescreens sometimes I will “catch” on a widget accidentally.  This would never happen on IOS.  I think Android/Sense UI are far more powerful than IOS but IOS is far more intuitive and user friendly right out of the box.  Argue if you like but which device would YOUR grandmother or a 4 year old have an easier time learning?

Non-existent standards – This phone features a micro HDMI port. Have you ever seen a micro HDMI cable or adapter?  Nah, me either…

No skype – I was really surprised that Skype hasn’t been released for this platform yet.  It’s disappointing since I use it for international calls to Canada.  I thought it would also be ideal because of the true multitasking too.  Hopefully when it finally arrives it can be used as a home screen widget.

Market Place woes – The market place is great because they allow anything but also horrible for the same reason.  There is a ton of garbage in there including unfinished apps, beta(abandoned) apps and fart apps.  I found one today called “Do not buy this app”.  Can’t they clean this crap out?  Would it really be that hard?

I firmly think that all of these problems I’ve mentioned are quite fixable and will probably be worked out in the first few months.  The exception being the Market Place.  I think it’s the wild wild west when it comes to vetting out good apps.  They have opened the flood gates to compete with Apple’s claim of 100,000 apps but they’ve ended up with 75% junk apps that would never have made it into iTunes in the first place.  That being said, I like that fact that Metasploit on Android without rooting is on the horizon and there are a stack of NES/SNES emulators available.  The fact that iTunes blocks applications like that is fairly irritating.  I also like the fact that I never have to plug the phone into my computer to load music, docs, calender/email sync, etc.  That being said, both the iPod Touch and HTC EVO 4G will be SHARING spacing in my pocket for the foreseeable future.