Editorial: Saying Goodbye To The EVO 3D
Its that time again and as I transition from EVO to EVO I always say a few words about my experience with the phone I am about to retire. I did the very same thing with the legendary HTC EVO 4G and now the time has come to do it with the underrated HTC EVO 3D. If you are interested in taking a look at my thoughts on the EVO 4G it can be read at my previous website by googling “Saying Goodbye To The EVO 4G” when you find it it will not show me as the author but I assure you I wrote it. Back to the subject of the EVO 3D this phone has been awesome to say the least. One of the reasons for this has been the outstanding development support but the number one reason was the outstanding specs which hold up (and even surpass) a lot of the phones released today. So lets take a closer look at my treasured companion for the past year. The 3DVO.
Features:
Display: Ahh the thing that made the EVO 3D special depending on who you ask, 3D. Now 3-D is regarded by many, most of whom don’t own the phone anyway, a gimmick. I for one love the feature especially for photography and video playback. That being said the EVO 3D has a pretty nice screen to be a year old. The phone comes with a 4.3 inch (540 x 960 ) QHD display which I never had a single complaint about. It’s a long way from AMOLED but far better than the displays on a lot of comparable handsets and did I mention its 3-D. Yeah it is a glasses free stereoscopic 3-D display which is darn cool for those who don’t get sick looking at it.
Processor: As the era of the dual core smartphone was being ushered in the EVO 3-D weighed in with it’s Qualcomm MSM8660 dual core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz, but as our readers may know can be overclocked with a custom kernel to 1.7 GHz. As owners of the EVO 4G know one of its weaknesses was graphics (seems to be the case with Snapdragon) and the EVO 3D tried to improve upon this by including the Adreno 220 GPU . What this package added up to was blazing speeds and decent battery life. Of course with what the development community did with this phone is remarkable accomplishing 50 + hours of screen off battery life. The difference in terms of power, between this and the older EVO 4G were readily apparent from the moment I cut the phone on.
Camera: The camera on the EVO 3D was nothing to write home about in of itself. The 5 MP, 2560х1920 pixels, autofocus, and dual-LED flash were good don’t get me wrong but nothing spectacular. It took decent photos to be sure. However, the remarkable aspect of the camera was of course it’s ability to take Stereoscopic photos and videos. The 1.3 MP front facing camera was standard fair though. All in all the ability to take 3-D photos and videos is something I will cherish into the future as the phone will be around for just that purpose although it may collect a little dust between sessions now.
Saying Goodbye
So now to the sad part of this piece. The EVO 3D has held me down for a year and now I will be retiring. Interestingly enough the phone has been re-released on Virgin Mobile as the EVO V 4G so hopefully folks will get some use out of this article other than nostalgia. As for me I have thoroughly loved this phone and even preferred it to the Epic Touch resisting the option to upgrade it. It fared very well when compared to almost any device on the market up until today. As for tomorrow we’ll be shifting our focus to the newest inductee to the EVO family the HTC EVO 4G LTE. For what it is worth the EVO 3D was a worthy successor to the EVO 4G in every way though many disagree (most of whom never really spent enough time with the phone to root it and flash a ROM). Has it dethroned the EVO 4G in my mind as one of the greatest smartphones ever the 3D has some big shoes to fill in that regard so it is very hard to say. It should be noted this phone has stood the test of time like very few others even showing itself to be a worthy smartphone a year after it’s release. How many phones can we really make that boast about? More to come Androidians!
