Sprint's HTC Evo: Give it a miss. A love hate relationship.

They tried hard at Sprint, but the phone does NOT sync to Outlook reliably. They showed the very best in customer service, and even gave me a sizable credit to my bill for all the tribulation. I didn't even ask for it. So kudo's to them.

Now.. HTC. DONT buy their stock. I was told the TouchPro2 is so bad Sprint gets returns of them like a boomerang. The HTC Hera took me 15 minutes before it would actually call someone. I got all the way to the bar, before it called the person at the bar I was trying to let know I was on the way! Wow. Useless.

HTC Sync to outlook does not sync Notes or Tasks. REALLY?!!? After the HTC Sync update, the phone will not sync at all with Outlook. It just sits there, looking confused. Many hours and reboots later, I gave up, and tried a trial download of Markspace.com's MissingSync. they do Sync to Outlook Notes, but not Tasks. Wow. Really?!

After about a week of trial and error, I have about 10 error log files & a thread of about 20 emails trying to boil it all down. Want to keep us in a recession? Keep the workforce using broken garbage like this Android platform. To be fair, iPhone also does not sync to all the PIM databases (contacts, calendars, tasks, notes, and their associated categories. Nokia, Blackberry, Windoze Mobile, Sony Ericsson's, and yahoo.com all still do. By the way, this ability has been around since 1997. This is NOT new. What is new are these otherwise smartphones, that ignore the necessity in the workplace of these functions.

If you see a guy with an Android or iPhone, he is using a paper black book to keep his tasks in, probably his notes too!

High Tech Baby!

As for the EVO itself. It has a LOT of power. As opposed to the other Droids I tested, this one truly "Does". So. Why does it fall short of the mark? The battery gets soaked up in two hours unless you are a savvy user who loves constantly playing nursemaid to your phone, killing apps, toggling services, reducing screen brightness. It is a game unto itself keeping the power usage to a minimum. Then there is the fact that there are pre-installed apps that you cant uninstall, and they turn themselves on in the background whenever they feel like. All soaking up CPU cycles, and therefore draining your battery. I had to Root the phone to turn those off.

Contacts are a mess. gmail has it's own database, Exchange users will have another, and if you USB Sync to Outlook, still another. And you cant automatically connect them! It is kike herding cats keeping things synced! I have 1 gmail, 1 exchange, and 5 Google Apps domains. So.. I have at least 3 separate copies of every contact in my database. Instead of a mere 2500 contacts. I now have 7500, which will surely slow things down and chew up even more battery time! Fabulous! There is nothing like waiting about 20-30 seconds to find a frequently called contact. That makes a body feel gooood. mmm-hmm.

Calendars - Pick one calendar. That is all they let you use. I am pretty this was imposed by HTC, not Google, since screen shots of other Androids depict menu items that do not exist on the Evo, which would allow you to add all sorts of Calendars. You can create endless calendars in gmail calendars. You can even sync those to iCal on Mac (If you hack the prefs to fool into thinking you are something like an ipod), but just one in the Android on HTC! Wow. Lucky I know how to jerry rig that one gmail calendar thru the various Google Apps installations I have to use! I have daisy chained my gmail.com calendar thru 5 separate intranets I manage, so I can keep my calendar items all straight. Wow.

BlueTooth implementation on the phone is a joke. The phone's ringing doesn't pipe through your headset, it just rings loud and clear on the phone for everyone in the meeting to enjoy. Heaven forbid you hold both hands around the phone. It will drop your connection. That was a fun discovery. You can ONLY talk on the phone via BT. You cant listen to "new" voicemails on the BT headset. Or music. Or anything else.

"New" Voicemail leaves the old voicemails in the old system.. If you dont call in to the old system,sit there for 15 minutes, and manually deleting them one by one, your inbox will be full. This is a Sprint-Android thing, and they are looking into to it. Meanwhile, I dont get voicemails without cleaning house every few days. Like I need something extra to remember to do!

4G in ATL is a frakking MYTH. Don't believe a word of it. We were at the bar at Ted's on Peachtree near Piedmont hospital. Never able to get a 4G signal. Decatur? Nada. Piedmont Park? Nope. Lenox? 1 bar. Screachingly slow.
At home, I have stand in a yoga posture at my house to use 4g. At least I get a light work out while I surf.

I will miss some of the apps though. "English to Redneck SMS" for example. TimeCatcher is a real cool app. SMS export to email is neat for those stalkers that storm through our lives. Google Sky wows the kids and crumb-snatchers. Alas, apps dont pay the bills, all except TimeCatcher and the Mileage/Expenses app.. these will be sorely missed.

Keeping my handheld synced to Outlook pays the bills. End of story.

I dont like or even respect Outlook, but it is the ONLY affordable software out there that does what it does. I have spent a lot of time looking so I could leave, and there is a story behind each one that forces me to return to slow, blue-wheel of death, 10 minutes to check IMAP email, schlocky Outlook.

So back to the stinky, limited, stale-looking, cant-quite-surf-the-web-if-there-is-a-java-script-and-cant-read-it-anyway-if-it-does-load, apps-store-when-you-run-it-crashes-phone-50%-of-the-time, and stinks at social media (facebook): Blackberry 8330.

Whimper. Whine.