HTC Evo 4G LTE review

HTC has clearly figured out what Samsung and others haven't: materials matter. Like the One X, the Evo 4G LTE (which I'll just call the Evo from now on) is a well-built phone with an incredibly high-end feel to it. The phone is black all over, save for a silver metal strip running around the edges. The whole phone has a metallic look to it, again lending it a classy feel you won't get from a plastic Samsung phone. Even with such high build quality, the Evo's still thin (8.9mm) and light (4.7 ounces) enough to barely be noticed in your pocket.

The Evo is a fairly minimal device on the front, but around back things get crazy. The bottom of the back panel is a smooth matte black, and feels really nice to hold. The top part of the panel is a glossy black surface, with a red-ringed camera lens in the middle. It's quite striking, and actually looks pretty good out of the box — five minutes later, though, the top is riddled with fingerprints and doesn't look nearly as nice. I'm picky about fingerprints, and found myself constantly wiping both the front and back of the Evo on my jeans to try and clean off the surfaces.

The two pieces of the back are split by a red stripe that houses an Evo classic: a kickstand. The stand is barely noticeable in the red stripe until you pull it out (which is oddly difficult to do, by the way), and when extended it holds the Evo up at a handful of different positions. It's a sturdy stand, and a nice thing to have if you want to watch movies in bed or use your phone as an alarm clock, but it's also totally unobtrusive if you don't want to use it. Sprint loves its kickstands, and so do I, so I'm glad to see it work so well here.

The Evo is huge — it has to be, with a 4.7-inch display — but even at 5.3 inches tall and 2.7 inches wide it doesn't feel unwieldy. I wish the power button were mounted on the side, where it's easier to reach without shimmying your hand up the side of the phone, but otherwise the phone is sensibly laid out and completely usable. The headphone jack sits next to the power button on top; there's a dedicated camera button on the right side, underneath the two volume buttons. If you pry the top glossy back panel off, you'll get access to a microSD card slot (and some cool-looking circuitry). The microSD slot is a definite advantage over the finite storage of the One X, despite being a little hard to access underneath the back panel. (There's also 16GB of internal storage.) All the controls blend nicely into the phone's edges, but the flip side is that they can be hard to press, and occasionally take two or three mashes to respond.

The Evo's design is probably a more polarizing one than the other One series phones — you'll either love or hate the two-tone back. Regardless, the Evo certainly lives up to the high bar set by the One X and One S in terms of build and material quality.

More than once, I found myself just sort of staring at the Evo's 4.7-inch display, for no particular reason. It's the best display I've ever seen on a smartphone by a long shot, and one of the best screens I've ever looked at, period. It has nearly 180-degree viewing angles, and the most accurate color reproduction I've seen — many displays give off a slightly warm color temperature or are too high-contrast, but the Evo's display is exactly right. At 720p it's so high-res that I can't make out individual pixels, and in general it's far superior to the PenTile display on the Galaxy Nexus and many other smartphones.

A phone's display is arguably its most important feature at this point, since it's the thing you'll be starting at all the time. It's the Evo's biggest advantage over the Galaxy Nexus, which looks pedestrian in comparison. So much screen sucks down a lot of power (more on that below), but it's a worthwhile tradeoff to get such excellent quality.

Cameras

HTC has built a fantastic camera system, without building a fantastic camera. The app is great, with tons of options and filters available easily; the ImageSense chip in the Evo makes the camera insanely fast, able to take up to 200 shots in rapid succession through a burst mode. Its pictures are good, but not great — dynamic range in particular leaves a lot to be desired, so you'll often have half your picture dark and the other half bright, or half properly exposed and the other half totally blown out. Colors also look a bit washed out, even in good lighting. The 8-megapixel sensor captures good images in good light, and is certainly one of the better smartphone cameras out there, but no one's ever going to think your photos came from anything but a phone.

1080p video recording is basically the same story: pretty good for a camera phone, but not good enough to be a competitor to a dedicated camera or camcorder. The 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera is exactly like every other front-facing phone camera.

Software

The camera software is one of the best things about Sense 4.0, the latest version of HTC's Android UI skin. Once again, little's changed from the One X — it's the best Sense yet, but it's still not as good as stock Android. There are a handful of things that are legitimately worse — the default keyboard is bad, the 3D multitasking menu is much less efficient, and there's often wasted screen real estate because there are capacitive menu keys rather than on-screen buttons. The biggest problem, though, is that it disrupts an otherwise cohesive and beautiful Android design aesthetic. Android 4.0 finally infused design into the entire operating system, and Sense (and any UI skin, for that matter) undoes some of that work. HTC's been telling anyone who will listen about how toned down Sense 4.0 is, and that's certainly the case, but it's not yet to the point where I'm in favor of using it.

There's a lot less bloatware on the Evo than on AT&T's One X or T-Mobile's One S, and some of it is actually really useful. Dropbox comes preloaded, and upon signing in you'll actually be given 25GB of free online storage — that's pretty awesome. Google Wallet also comes preinstalled, and works with the Evo's NFC chip. There's the usual cadre of carrier- and HTC-installed apps like Watch and Sprint Zone, but Sprint showed definite restraint here, and the phone feels much cleaner for it.