OK, so last I wrote I had used 511mb of data in just over 1 month. Well this past Thursday my son and I travelled to Austin to pickup my nephew at the airport. In the car my nephew pulled out his laptop and he and my son were doing something when they started talking about wouldn't it be neat to be able to play World of Tanks while driving down the road. Being the tech savvy father that I am, I quickly said, "Here let's try something". I pulled over to the side of the road and pulled out my HTC EVO Shift and turned on WiFI and started up the WiFi Tether program. Told my nephew to check his wireless networking connections and sure enough there it was. Told him to connect and see if the speed would allow him to play. After a few moments the program loaded, the connection to server completed and we were driving down the road blowing tanks up. DAMN! Ain't technology great!.
Anyway, on Sunday I took my son and nephew back to Austin, Texas to attend ID Tech Camp at St. Edwards University. While I was in Austin I said to myself... "hmmmmm, I wonder if I can connect to 4g here". So I figured I would try to connect and sample the 4g network. Compared to the 3g network I have one thing to say
" WOW ! "
The speed was absolutely amazing, and so was the battery drain. The speed was equivalent or faster than my home 3mb connection. I should have logged into www.speedtest.net and tested the speed but I just did not think about it. However, in the 20 mins of use more than half of my battery life was drained.
The map and Google navigation features worked very well, although I must admit that I pretty well knew where I was going to start. The voice however left a little to be desired. It was somewhat difficult to understand at times and had trouble "pronouncing" some of the weird Austin street names. Otherwise, got the job done.
When I first posted about my HTC EVO Shift I was not to nice when it came to comparing the Blackberry to my HTC EVO Shift, I will say that the Sprint Navigation package on the Blackberry Curve worked just as well as the Google navigation software but two things to note 1) The Blackberry voice was very, very easy to understand compared to the HTC EVO/Google voice and 2) I was able to use the Blackberry Navigation feature for 4 hours and only use 2/3 of my battery vs. 20 mins on the HTC EVO. Now granted the 20 mins on the HTC EVO was using Spring 4g and not the standard 3g data setup. I would image the HTC EVO would last longer using the 3g vs. the 4g. The other big BUT related to the Blackberry is other than the navigation feature working nice it still SUCKED BIG TIME!.
I have used my HTC EVO so much over the past five or six weeks that I have not had but maybe two days where I did not have to recharge the battery during the day. So here is a partial list of apps I use on my HTC EVO (will try to provide links):
Astrid Task Manager
Days Left
Dropbox
1password
Instant Heartrate
TC2000 Charting Software for Technical Analysis of Stocks
Maps
Messaging
Dolphin HD Browser
Wireless Tether (yes I have rooted my phone and do not pay Sprint $30 a month for a mobile hotspot)
WIFI Analyzer
Antennas Locator
GasBuddy
Kindle Reader
Doubletwist for Itunes Music Management
Bartender
Great Clips on-line Check-in
Southwest Airlines App
Nationwide App (yes my wife hit an Axis the other night and I used the app a little...did not file claim with it though)
Flightview
Gmail
Fandango to buy movie tickets etc
Netflix Queue Manager
OI Notepad (with OI Safe)
Shazam (to identify songs that I know but can not remember)
Games: Reversi, Dominoes, Alchemy, OpenSuduko, Mouse Trap, Backgammon
Anyway, as you can see my HTC EVO Shift is quickly becoming a tool that I use all the time for all kinds of tasks. In fact I posted and updated this entire article from my EVO just to see if it could be done. It was a little difficult, and my thumbs are sore (especially having to edit all of the links) but it was doable and I only had to correct a few problems from a PC because I just could not get the cursor to go where I wanted it to.
Drop me a line if you have any exciting things to do on an EVO and I will think about posting it.
Till next time, take care and have fun,
YASDC
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