If you’re carrying an EVO 4G and live in St. Louis, MO; Richmond, VA; or Salt Lake City, UT, it’s time to smile: that mandatory monthly $10 fee you pay for the 4G network just got a whole lot more worthwhile.
That adds 3 more cities to the slowly growing list of WiMax-enabled cities — a list which, by the way, we’ve got right behind the jump.
All of the cities with Sprint 4G, as of June 28th, 2010:
Georgia – Atlanta, Milledgeville
Hawaii – Honolulu, Maui
Idaho – Boise
Illinois – Chicago
Maryland – Baltimore
Missouri – Kansas City, St. Louis
Nevada – Las Vegas
North Carolina – Charlotte, Greensboro (along with High Point and Winston-Salem), Raleigh (along with Cary, Chapel Hill and Durham);
Oregon – Portland, Salem
Pennsylvania – Harrisburg, Lancaster, Philadelphia, Reading, York
Texas – Abilene, Amarillo, Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Killeen/Temple, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, San Antonio, Waco, Wichita Falls
Utah – Salt Lake City
Virginia – Richmond
Washington – Bellingham, Seattle
If you’re still on the fence whether to opt for Verizon’s Droid X or instead go 4G with the EVO on Sprint, you may want to spend a few minutes perusing the Droid X’s leaked manual. It shows in detail the tweaked UI, on-screen keyboard with Swype, and even gives tips to extending the battery’s life. There doesn’t seem to be anything that surprising within, though, but totally worth your time if this might be your next phone. [AlienBabel via BGR]
The Samsung Epic 4G joins the HTC Evo as Sprint’s 4G handsets, but diverges with the fact that it has a slide-out keyboard. It looks like the Galaxy S Pro, which we’ve been hearing about leaked in the past few weeks. More »
The Motorola Droid and Droid X are going to get Android Froyo at some point in July and August respectively but theyre not going to be the only Android hot smartphones to get the update. Sprint is also interesting in offering its HTC EVO 4G customers Googles latest mobile OS and the carrier could launch Android 2.2 at some point next month.We have no actual release dates for now but according to information that comes from Sprint representatives the HTC EVO 4G will be getting Andro
I just had the opportunity to spend some quality time with Motorola’s latest addition to their Android lineup, the beastly Droid X superphone, and man-oh-man, is it glorious. It’s not exactly unique; it’s nearly identical to Sprint’s EVO 4G, both in appearance and specifications — but given how well the EVO 4G has been received by Android fans, I’d say that’s probably not a bad thing.
The Hardware:
When I say this thing’s similar to the EVO, I’m not kidding. Both have a 4.3″ display (though the Droid X’s has a sliiiightly higher resolution, at 848×480 rather than 800×480.), a 1 GHZ CPU, an 8 megapixel camera, and rock the fullface touchscreen candy bar form factor in a pretty jaw-dropping way. The X lacks the Evo’s 4G functionality, and the front-facing camera — but other than that, it’s pretty much spec-for-spec.
With all that said, this thing is about as easy on the eyes as they come. As you’d expect from anything packing a 4.3″ display, this thing feels massive in your hand — not so big that it’s overwhelming, but definitely bigger than what I’m used to. It fits in my almost-but-not-quite hipster pants, taking up pretty much the entirety of the front pocket.
In our cursory glance, the overall build quality seems top notch. They’ve done away with the easily dented speaker grille of the original Droid, and dramatically improved their battery cover design. That may seem trivial, but those little touches tend to reflect how well a device is built through and through.
Though it’s missing the front-facing camera, I otherwise favor this device’s face over that of the Evo. Why? Actual, physical, real-life buttons. Call me silly, but I can’t stand touch-sensitive buttons.
The OS:
Alas, contrary to what we heard at the last minute, the Droid X won’t be getting Android 2.2 at launch. It’ll get it “this summer”, but it launches with 2.1 out of the gate.
Unlike all Droids that came before it, the Droid X is running Motorola’s customized user interface, MOTO BLUR. If you’ve spent any time with other handsets running this UI (like most of T-Mobiles Moto/Android offerings) and are thus shaking your head in disappointment right now: don’t fret. Though we’ve only spent a few minutes with it, this latest version of BLUR seems to be dramatically toned back from everything we’ve seen so far (Thank God.) The social networking widgets are moved out of your face to a back page, and many have been turned off by default.
Motorola’s got a few nice customizations in place here, such as a fairly nice CoverFlow-esque sliding view in the video player’s list. It’s smooth as butter and slick as heck. Want a more standard list? You might be out of luck. I couldn’t find one, nor could the rep.
Video recording/playback:
Though you can only tell so much from a 5 minute demo of the device’s video functionality, I walked away impressed. The video output via HDMI looked stellar, and the demonstration videos shot with the device all looked surprisingly good. Of course, they all coincidentally took place at extremely brightly lit beaches and parks, rather than the quality-destroying bars and nightclubs they’ll actually be used at.
Motorola makes pretty clever use of the device’s 3 microphones (front, back, and a noise cancellation mic on top) with three video “Scenario” modes: Narrative, Outdoors, and Subject. Narrative turns down the volume from the back mic, focusing the audio recording on your voice as you shoot; Outdoors shoots from both mics, using the noise cancellation mic to nullify some of the wind; subject is the contrast to the narrative option, focusing the mic recording input on things behind the camera.
Other notes:
It comes with a few built-in applications: Skype, Blockbuster, NFL Mobile, V-Cast, and Backup assistant. As far as you can tell, you can’t remove these. Boo.
It comes with Motorola-added Live Wallpaper, featuring the now iconic Droid eye
Conclusion:
So far, so good. I’ll wait until my full review to really decide where this sits on the Android totem pole, but I’m having a hard time finding any flaws with this device so far. If you’re open to switching carriers, you might still want the Sprint EVO for its 4G functionality and the front facing camera — but if you’re a Verizon devout, this looks to be the new one to beat.
The Evo has an 802.11n-capable chip inside, but it’s gimped to run slower 802.11g. If you’ve rooted your Evo (a serious task in itself), modders can help you remedy this limitation by changing just two lines of code. More »
The HTC EVO 4G is a really hot smartphone in the USA so far but it looks like the 4G Android device comes with an unexpected manufacturing flaw. It looks like the glass on top of it is not properly glued as some users have reported various glass separation issues. The lower sections of the screen are apparently affected by the problem and its definitely annoying to see such things happen to one of the hottest handsets out there.Theres no word from HTC on the matter just yet and were
The tales surrounding the launch of the EVO 4G have been intriguing, to say the least. On June 4th, the device launched. By June 7th, Sprint was touting the phone’s sales as mammoth, claiming that it had broken their previous one-day sales records (as held by the Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre) by as much as 3 times. Just two days later, they recanted that story, declaring that they had “erred” in their original estimations, and that the sales numbers were inline with those of their previous top sellers.
There was, however, a bit of the story which we didn’t see: the part where a Sprint employee used the inventory system to figure out exactly how many EVO 4Gs were sold and posted that number online, resulting in a speedy investigation by Sprint HQ and the employee’s immediate termination.
We’ve reached out to Sprint for a comment on the matter, but here’s the story as we’re hearing it so far from a trusted source: On the afternoon of June 6th (before Sprint had released any sales numbers), a Sprint retail employee posted a note to the growingly infamous phone hacking forum, XDA-Developers, with sales figure details gleaned from their system. The post has since been removed, but bits of it are still lingering in Google’s cache:
“according to sprint we as a [company] have sold 66,483 theres a whole bunch of stores though that dont have any more inventory i dont think any major city sprint does”
According to this employee’s perusing, Sprint had dished out roughly 66.5 thousand EVO 4Gs after a little more than two days following launch. (Note that, as far as I know, this number only accounts for Sprint stores — not third party sellers like WalMart, RadioShack, etc. Even then, this number could be incorrect, depending on how the employee uncovered the number and any updating latency involved. I doubt Sprint’s going to confirm its accuracy, so take it with a grain of salt.)
Now, this post went mostly unnoticed by blogs and other media outlets — but it didn’t go unnoticed by Sprint HQ. As leaks are becoming more and more prevalent, carriers and manufacturers are dedicating more resources toward keeping an eye on forums like these for any breadcrumbs leading back to the source. Unfortunately for this given leakster, the breadcrumbs were all there.
Within a few days, an internal Sprint team (which, we’re told, is known around the carrier as “Forensics”) had traced the employee back to his Florida store. One of Sprint’s internal security task force members was immediately flown from Kansas to Florida; the employee was pulled in, their posting habits literally laid all out on the table, and they were terminated on the spot.
We see leaks each and every day; they are, after all, the lifeblood of any good gadget blog. Just because they’re a regular occurrence, however, doesn’t mean that employers are going to let them slide. They’re well within their rights to let any red-handed info-leakers go — and if any NDAs are involved, there very well could be some litigation involved. If the breadcrumbs are there, they’ll find’em.
The HTC Evo, with its 4.3″ display, is a humongous phone. But next to the forthcoming Motorola Droid X, which reportedly also sports a 4.3″ screen, the Evo looks positively reasonable. Yeah, the Droid X is gonna be large. [BGR] More »
