Pedro B

So I’ve been wanting to upgrade from the Blackberry Storm for awhile now.  The Storm has been an awesome phone but there are so many better smartphones out there now that it feels obsolete sometimes.

I want an iPhone because it is probably the best phone out there (my opinion) but I refuse to deal with At&t.  All the rumors about the iPhone 4 coming to Verizon made me put off buying a new phone until I was sure that was not going to happen.

The obvious next choice for someone looking for a great smartphone with plenty of apps would be android based.  My problems with Android based phones are as follows:

1. Google made it and thus can track your every move.
2. Android devices have been known to have terrible battery life and nobody will accept responsibility for it.
3. All of the updates and inability to get those new software updates on a phone that is only a few months old.

First of all I use a lot of Google powered products every day (gmail, google docs, chrome) but I don’t trust what they do with the data Google gathers from my usage.  As long as users are aware that what they do online is being hoarded by Google then we can minimize the damage.  But that’s another topic altogether…

I went ahead and bought an Android smartphone because they are packed with all the features I want, I can tether my Android smartphone to my laptop, and they are much more customizable then a lot of the smartphones out there.

Out of the box the HTC Evo is an awesome phone.  Already loaded with great apps by default, like Facebook, Maps, Voice navigation and it comes with an awesome camera.  The major problem with this is that they are all turned on and running right out of the box!  There should be a setup process that lets a user decide which apps and connections (4g, 3g, email sync, GPS, Wi-fi, bluetooth!) to allow when the phone is first turned on.  This would have saved my battery the first day.

I got mine in the evening, messed around with it, then put it on the charger.  The next day I get up and go to work only to watch my battery life drain away with practically ZERO usage on my part.  I work ten hour days minimum so having a phone that lasts all day is a must for me.

I did research different solutions online but a lot of it is crap.  The main thing the Evo needs for decent battery life is to have some of those connections turned off.  I don’t need GPS to be running at all hours, I don’t use bluetooth most of the time, so those were the first connections that got shut off.  I’m not typically around Wi-Fi networks either so I turned that off but I don’t think that made a huge difference.  I also went in to the apps (settings > Accounts and Sync) and disabled most of the social networks from syncing at all hours.  These changes alone have taken the battery life from around 8 hours to maybe 24 hours.  I can live with that for now while I learn what else I can do to save battery life.

I used to go 2-3 days on my Storm without the need for juice but I couldn’t do half the things this HTC Evo does so all in all I am pretty happy with this phone.  Maybe in 2012 Apple will get away from AT&T.  In the meantime the Evo is a good smartphone that I’m still learning how to get the most of.