I am now the proud owner of an HTC Evo V 4G through Virgin Mobile. I manage to get 1 to 2 bars of 4g Service in my apartment , even though the coverage map shows no 4G in my town, which was a pleasant confirmation of my experience with my VM MiFi device. I half expected the phone not to register with the 4G coverage, and initially it didn’t, but once it received its service updates everything was fine and in working order.
The UI is amazing, I am not a fan of the pure Google UI since I really feel it lacks style. HTC I think manages to capture all the finesse of both worlds, and while not perfect , is a treat to use. The weather/clock widget is, I think, one of the major pluses of the phone, along with its other widgets. If I remember correctly this is Sense UI 3.6, so this is the heavy HTC experience… I find it to be very serviceable.
Battery life is terrible on this phone. I am going to upgrade to a double capacity battery, HTC phones seem to lack in this one area and I’m afraid to say it is going to make me think twice about buying HTC in the future (Ed: The new extra battery capacity of 3750 mAh is phenomenal). I love HTC style and technology, but really I can’t much use out of this phone unless it is fully charged. Other than this problem it is a great device overall.
4G service in my apartment reaches 5 Mbps down and a few hundred Kbps up, which is more than adequate for what I intend to use the phone for, but obviously WiMAX can do much better than this. I suppose Virgin Mobile simply doesn’t get the full speed of the network, which would make perfect sense given the small amount of money I pay for the service every month.
4.0 Android was very welcome since now I have Flash, which is missing from my Nexus 7 Chrome browser. Hopefully soon websites will start coding and encoding for non flash enabled devices, it can’t come too soon. The day I can use my mobile devices on all of the same sites I can visit with my Windows PCs will be an ‘appy day…
Steven A, on computing and life... 