EVO 4G returns!
“It’s déjà vu all over again” Yogi Berra
“The EVO has landed” proclaims Sprint, featuring 4G LTE before Sprint’s coverage is available. Seems like only yesterday (actually two years ago) I was anticipating my second “smart phone”, my first since 2001, and anticipating 4G WiMAX (which I’m still waiting for, at least at my home and other frequent locations).
Re-reading what I wrote after a month’s experience, I don’t see a lot to say differently. The biggest surprise is that I’ve used Skype so little on my Evo, only two times that I remember for a video call. I don’t remember much about the first call, but the second one seemed surprisingly satisfying from a calling perspective, and the portability allowed me to show my sister all 5 of our cats in various poses around the house.
My biggest complaint continues to be the sporadic WiMAX coverage, which seemingly hasn’t improved, and probably won’t given the trends toward LTE. Most of the time I have WiFi available and don’t feel deprived without WiMAX. But there are also times when I turn on the WiMAX radio in hopes of coverage, and more often than not, see the warning icon that tells me I’m wasting battery on non-existent 4G.
So I’m not pre-ordering an EVO 4G LTE when (a) Sprint doesn’t have LTE anywhere and (b) Austin isn’t one of the initial Sprint LTE cities. I expect I’ll keep the original EVO until the hardware fails. If that happens in the near term, then the new EVO seems like a promising option, as long as I don’t count on LTE.