Don’t Buy The HTC EVO, It Is A Seriously Flawed Device | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Buy The HTC EVO, It Is A Seriously Flawed Device

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46 pointsukdm59 comments

I was about --| |-- this close to waiting in line last Friday for the EVO launch and moving away from my iPhone. Then I got to play with one for awhile and I was really shocked by the battery issue.

I kept thinking that reviewers were just overstating the point for the sake of traffic, that the HTC EVO didn't get good battery life but that it was a relative measure. Then I played with one and in half an hour of web browsing and using the menus (with Sense turned off, display reduced, task killer in action, in the Mission Bay district of SF where Sprint's signal is good) and we rampaged through 20% of the battery.

20% in half an hour. Guys, this is not cool.

For comparison, with my pre-4.0gm I used my iPhone 3GS for web work an average of an hour and a half per day with between 1-2 hours of talking and push email and nearly all-day iPod use on and I came home with 20-40% (mostly that depended on talk time), and I could still rely on it to be my iPod at the gym even if I was using Pandora. I go 8am-11pm with confidence. With the iOS 4.0GM, it's like I've got a 20% battery upgrade and I'm using the device more.

It's really frustrating that Apple keeps making hardware that fits my specs but not being on a carrier that does me right. Meanwhile other carriers—carriers that I know will drop far fewer calls and have far fewer problems at crowded events—simply cannot get a phone that doesn't have a tower of serious flaws. The closest stab in recent memory was the Nexus One (with its terribly flawed touchscreen) and the Droid (which by now appears like a doddering old slowpoke by comparison to the current crop of phones).

The Evo sucks down battery. I found that by disabling background data transfer the battery life improved Tremendously, to the point where it's not an issue anymore and I can go 1.5-2 days between charges.

However, I would love to be able to install Froyo and remove Sense. I imagine each of those steps would help to improve battery life even further.

Aside from being aesthetically ugly, Sense is so tightly embedded that it's impossible to fully disable it. I'd prefer some nice HTC branded wallpaper that could be easily disabled in a few minutes.

I doubt Sense makes a difference in battery life. It's also my understanding that it's just a home screen; change the preference for which app manages the home screen, and you are back to plain Android.

What's irritating about Sense is that it basically precludes any updates. My guess is that the Evo 4G gets Froyo never, which is why I think I'm just going to get a Nexus One. Or wait for a Nexus Two.

Hmm, well it's not possible to remove Sense and it continues to show active processes with the word sense in them even after I stopped using the various home screen stuff.

> I doubt Sense makes a difference in battery life. It's also my understanding that it's just a home screen; change the preference for which app manages the home screen, and you are back to plain Android.

Absolutely not. Sense includes replacement applications for loads of stuff (contact list, phone, etc...) as well as a specific keyboard, it's a complete revamp of the Android UI.

But all that stuff is configurable, too. I use plain Android, but I have used other keyboards. It's just a preference to change somewhere.

If you can tell me where to navigate to remove it please do. I have looked :)

Far's I understand, you can't remove it but you can replace (most of) it. By other stuff.

Yes, you can configure different crap than the Sense one, but the point is Sense is in no form of shape a vanilla Android environment.

In fact, that's one of the parts which feels a lot like fragmentation (of the bad kind) in the Android ecosystem.

You have Android on one side, and HTC's Sense on the other side, and they sure as hell don't cooperate, and though the applications are common as far as user knowledge and UI go they might as well be different OSes.

Will there be a Nexus Two? Only about 135k Nexus One's have been sold. Google is shuttering their web store that they were selling the Nexus One at. While a technical and usability triumph, it has to be said that the Nexus One is a bit of a boondoggle, considering how much Google and HTC probably spent developing it.

The big problem for Google is that they wanted to change the way people bought cell phones, but it just didn't take. The phone companies control the sales channel (except for the Apple store) and they probably won't want to sell a Google-branded Android phone without all of their silly carrier-specific modifications (NASCAR? Really, Sprint? NASCAR?!?). If there ever is a Nexus Two, Google has to figure out where they're going to sell it.

There seemed to be some kind of media backlash against this phone in the US but they're selling it unbranded on Vodafone in Europe and the HTC Desire appears to be fundamentally the same phone (sold with the Sense UI, but again without carrier branding). I can't see how the phone hardware, as opposed to the attempt to change the sales channels in the US, can be considered any kind of white elephant.

That's a good point about the Desire. If Google does make a Nexus Two, I guess that's how they'd do it - ride on the back of an already-developed smartphone.

Still, the web store for the Nexus One is going away - that seems to indicate that Google has lost interest in selling Google-branded phones. We can always hope they'll change their minds...

When is it going away? Will unlocked nexus ones still be sold?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20005015-265.html

I don't think the article mentions when it's being closed. And considering you can typically get any GSM/HSPA phone unlocked somewhere, I'm sure the Nexus One will still be available. Most 'unlocked phone stores' have gruesome markups though, and it was something of an anomoly that you could get such an advanced phone as the Nexus One unlocked for just $530. Just looking at a couple of online merchants, both Plemix.com and exoticphone.com both have the audacity to sell the Nexus One itself for a hefty markup!

$629 http://www.plemix.com/phone-htc-nexus_one-phone

$749 http://exoticphone.com/htc-google-nexus-one-unlocked-p-2065....

The Plemix.com one is especially amusing - it claims that $629 is a mark-down, and that the original price was $854! Keep in mind that Google has always and still is selling the Nexus One for $529 in their web store.

What is the consequence of turning these background dts off? Does that mean it won't poll facebook/twitter? Because I don't use those at all. Which means battery life is fine :)

Yes, it stops polling facebook, twitter, gmail. It was polling twitter twice b/c I installed the regular twitter app (it won't let me uninstall HTC's bundled twitter app).

I do not think you understand what I am saying.

In half an hour I took a fifth of the battery. With everything turned off. Even if there was some residual background stuff we missed, that is not acceptable performance. It wasn't flash, it wasn't fancy HTML5 demos, it wasn't even super-complex pages... it was regular web use. Sites like reddit, this site, my tumblr, etc. Some twitter on the side.

I agree the performance is totally unacceptable, and I'm actually trying to sell the Evo. I just wanted to mention that turning off background data transfer helped a lot for me and made the phone at least moderately usable while I find a buyer.

If you haven't found a buyer yet, let me know

I supposedly have one, but if you make a higher offer I will have to inform him of the bad news.

Here's my craigslist ad:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/mob/1777291180.html

The winning offer is lower than the $550 price, though I'd certainly accept that amount for it.

just sold it.

It's not AT&T's fault though, it's Apple's for allowing an exclusivity deal. If you did a wholesale move of every US iPhone owner to Verizon or Sprint, their networks would be similarly suckified.

Here in Australia the iPhone is unlocked and sold by every major carrier, and yet its launch still utterly trashed a couple of the networks. The situation has improved, but it shows what happens...

The exclusivity deal was arranged when AT&T held most of the leverage. Steve Jobs shopped around the different carriers to get the iPhone off the ground and with the exception of AT&T, they all balked at the terms he was seeking. AT&T was the only one willing to play ball, and as such could insist on the lengthy exclusiveness.

I'll just go buy my Verizon HTC EVO and laugh and laugh. Oh wait.

For better or worse, phones exist largely in an environment of exclusivity to carriers in many western countries. Apple has slightly improved the situation by creating a massive demand for a cross-carrier device. Blaming them for not simultaneously kicking the smartphone industry into high gear AND entirely reformatting the industry seems a little unfair. At some point other vendors need to step up as well.

Pity to poor "second carrier" in the US.

With the pent up "want an iPhone but won't use AT&T" base and the "have an iPhone but have been abused by AT&T too long" base they could go from zero to 10 million iPhones in a week.

Good luck pulling that off without a black eye.

(AT&T continues to amaze me by providing me a whopping 1000 bits/second over my EDGE connections, even with near full signal. I'm surprised they don't charge me an "intransit data storage fee" on my incoming packets. Also impressive is "The web server is not responding." failures, when it's my web server and I can see from the packet traces that it hasn't responded because their has been no request. I think that error ought to be changed to "We're sorry, we know you are paying for a data plan, but we don't feel like it right now. Suck it.")

There's conflicting evidence on this issue. Once I set my battery profile by draining it completely then recharging it with the power off, my battery life has been just fine.

I left my phone on, unplugged, last night, drove to work listening to a podcast, and have been at work for about two hours and my phone still reads a full charge. Advanced Task Killer is showing 18 apps running in the background (power user here :) )

Also, if you read the EVO forums there are plenty of other people who are getting great battery life out of this powerful device.

Same here, got two EVO's on a family plan both have about than 1/2 charge left at the end of the day after heavy usage throughout the day. As other people have said it's easy to see what drains your battery on android phone, but I guess the author of the article was more interested in sensationalism than chasing after facts.

From what I remember (and I may be mixing up phones here) it was use of 4G that chewed battery life. Are you using 4G at all?

> From what I remember (and I may be mixing up phones here)

You don't, but it's not entirely correct: from the early review, the Evo had a bad battery life (as in, noticeably under average for the category), and if 4G was turned on it went from bad to utterly terrible.

I had 4G turned on overnight as well (where I have full 4g/3g service). I've heard that leaving 4G on while in a 3G-only area will drain the battery, but hopefully that problem will be fixed with an update.

>There's conflicting evidence on this issue. Once I set my battery profile by draining it completely then recharging it with the power off, my battery life has been just fine.

This has been my experience with three prior HTC devices: Originally the battery life is horrendous, but after several cycles it gets better and better.

It's still far from great. I mean if I forget to plug it in at night after a day of intermittent use, it will be dead before the end of the next day. I'd rather it ran forever without being plugged in, but I've learned to deal (though it's a major PITA when camping or the like. You really have to baby it).

It's also too bad that people keep always holding their experience with bad battery life as a universal experience. When my phone is in my basement, for instance, battery life is TERRIBLE unless I turn it to airplane mode. Clearly it's straining to talk to the cell towers, causing a significant increase in consumption. The experience is completely different when it's upstairs.

So if you live in a condo with big thick concrete walls in a bad reception part of town, expect your battery life to be worse. You'll note that many people with very poor battery life find "Cell Standby" to be the biggest consumer.

HTC has been known to cut some corners on their hardware. For example they ship some variations of the HTC Hero with a tiny 1200mAh battery, others with a 1500mAh and will sell you an extended life 1800mAh. Why not just include the best battery possible? The HTC Evo ships with a 1500mAh battery -- the same as my HTC Hero that is half the clock speed with a smaller display. I don't get very good battery life on my Hero so I can only imagine the Evo with the same sized battery is really going to struggle. It looks like there's a 1750mAh extended life battery coming but that's not a huge improvement. (and it's going to cost you $50)

Extended life batteries are the new razor blades. :x

They really needed that $199 price point at any cost, I think. My impression from trying to buy one is that Sprint is not the wireless provider of choice for people with tons of money.

True. Consider the pricing per month:

450 Minutes, unlimited mobile/mobile and data: $59 for google IO attendees.

$29 per month to use wifi teathering.

This is 450 minutes for $90 per month! To make it unlimited the prices becomes $130 per month!

Compare that to T-Mobile which offers all that (unlimited) for $65 with the Nexus One.

Before you get an extended life battery may as well take a look at some information.

Here is a thread where people are talking about using the Seidio 1750 mAh in their Evo: http://androidforums.com/accessories-evo-4g/88887-seidio-inn...

And here is an older comparison of OEM and 3rd party batteries with disappointing results: http://www.batteryboss.org/

I have an evo. It's really a nice phone, however the battery life is indeed a major issue. However, better software will help fix the issue and make it a great phone.

Currently there's a couple of hackers attempting to open the NAND and make the filesystem read/write. This is a crucial step and needs help! Any low level guys or just general hackers should help the cause!

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=694034

Is there any hard info about what the battery issue is?

Some people think it's just Android being rubbish or written in Java or not made by Apple, but some people with the device seem to have no problems while others are writing articles like this.

I was under the impression that Android phones actually told you what had used up all the battery. I would have thought that might have been a good starting point for writing an actual journalistic article about this.

Settings > About phone > Battery use

Depending on the item you can see things like time on, CPU total, data sent/received. For example in the last hour my display has been on for 5m46s and that is 61% of battery usage.

This may be like the HTC Incredible issue - something is wrong with Flickr account syncing and it eats the battery alive.

JavaME was a known battery hog, but maybe Dalvik is better. Going with Java is a risky decision because whatever you do you still lose: if you ramp up the CPU it will consume more power and drain the battery, if you don't the software will be too slow. Add JIT and you use more battery.

I found it particularly amusing how one commenter was bragging about how his HTC EVO made it through the day on one battery charge.

What device do you have? One busy day seems to be standard with iPhones as I understand it and based on my experience with an iPhone 3G, though iPhones are generally supposed to be worse than say Nokias or Blackberries.

Apple's figures suggest that if you browse the web on 3G or Wifi, make calls or watch video constantly then you'd get 5-6 hours on my 3G, but even that's a high estimate as it assumes that when you're talking on the phone or watching videos then you have the 3G and WiFi powered off.

That's enough for me as it's routine for me to charge my phone every night (though I've turned notifications right down and I do have a car charger because using the GPS for directions seems to really eat at the battery) but I can imagine many kinds of travelling businessman who would find that an annoyance.

But the braggart said that he almost didn't use the phone...

I have a Nokia E72 and recharge every ~4 days with heavy 2.5G internet use, ~20 minutes of talk time per day, use as a PDA, etc. Almost no wi-fi, no videos, no music.

If he's bragging about 8 hours of standby then he's either confused or a troll. On the other hand some people have, apparently genuinely, struggled to get 8 hours of standby from this particular model, so he may have been refuting this with personal experience and everyone's got confused.

I'm not sure we're any closer to any actual conclusions about how battery hungry the Evo actually is, what problems it might have and what kind of usage triggers them.

> Add JIT and you use more battery.

That's not entirely correct: the JIT will generate some CPU overhead (and usually quite a bit of memory overhead, probably one of the reasons why Google redefined the baseline at 512MB), but when it does kick in it should generate more efficient code leading to either lower levels of CPU or shorter CPU burst, allowing the CPU to go back to idling faster.

Therefore I'd say on average the JIT should either be neutral or should improve battery life a bit, when loading the CPU.

In my use of the EVO battery life didn't seem that bad. A bit worse than the Nexus, but not a nightmare. I did run into the photo issue: got SD card errors when trying to save that would require rebooting the phone. Seems like a possible bug that a software upgrade could address.

Aside from these issues, the EVO's display makes it hard to go back to an N1. The display is gorgeous and the extra screen real estate makes typing via the soft keyboard significantly easier. Photos taken by the EVO are impressive as well: much better than the N1 or any smartphone I've ever seen.

Are we ever going to get an Android device (preferably on US T-Mobile) with comparable power to the new iPhone, that has a gorram slide-out keyboard?

I'm sincerely hoping that the next generation of the Nexus One has a slide out keyboard. I suffer from pretty bad shakes due to the cocktail of medication I'm taking and often typing on my iPhone is an exercise in futility. Luckily, there is hope for us yet!

"Google Inc executive Andy Rubin said on Friday that the next version of the Nexus One phone, which was made by HTC Corp, will be for enterprise users and might have a physical keyboard."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60809H20100109

You might want to keep an eye on the Samsung Galaxy S that's just been released in the UK. There's a rumour (and a fan-made mockup) of a "Pro" version with a hardware keyboard.

I have tried to buy an EVO 3 times now, and every time I've done so, I've shown up at the store to be laughed at by the sales people for wanting one (despite calling and being told that there was availability). Now that I've had time to think about the cost over a 24 month contract, I don't even want one anymore, even though I already have Sprint for my mobile broadband plan. (Sprint sucks, but Wimax is really good.)

Anyway, Arrington and the other TC reviewer already admitted they don't live in a 4G market. Why buy a 4G phone when you can't get 4G?

Those jackasses don't buy anything. It's all sent to them for free.

The T-Mobile G1 (HTC Magic) had horrendous battery life when it first came out. Gradually the battery life got better and better as they released more software updates. These were changes to the OS that made it use less battery life, however. There might not be as much "free juice" to squeeze out of this device. To be fair though, this is the first phone-like WiMAX device, and it's likely that they don't really understand the real world conditions of handheld WiMAX devices yet.

HTC Magic = myTouch 3G, HTC Dream = G1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Magic, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream

But... but... but... Eric Raymond said, "If I were an Apple marketing guy, I’d be asking “How the hell can I compete against the EVO 4G with this?”.

"Or wait a few months for a better android phone."

I think this line really exemplifies the difference between the iPhone and Android. The speed-to-market for a brand new Android device is -insane-.

I just went 45 hours between charges. I am not in a 4G market so the 4G radio is turned off and I use locale to disable GPS when I am at home but I really wonder about some of these issue people have experienced. It almost makes me wonder if the stock batteries may have had some bad manufacturing batches or something - either that or they really need to be conditioned properly which is something I was religious about the first few days.

I have the HTC Hero and I'm having the very same issues. Sense is mucking up the UI, the sd card can often not be read and the updates that are routinely being delayed by month. Worst of all, HTC has installed a kernel that blocks attempts to root the phone, which is required for updating. Basically I'm getting the Apple treatment but without the amazing devices.

Yeah, the Hero is a low-end device like the Dream and Sapphire. What you get for being an early adopter is shitty hardware.

i love my htc evo. the battery isn't as great as my pre but after disabling a few things and some tweaks it is not nearly as bad as everyone is making it out to be. hopefully it will get better with software updates or an extended battery that fits the standard cover will come out.

If you read nothing else in this article:

"MG Siegler irrationally loves the iPhone and it has become an important fashion accessory and self confidence crutch in his San Francisco hipster lifestyle."

Sorry, I thought that was too funny not to share with anybody skimming the thread . . .

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