iPhone 4 vs. HTC Evo 4G: Smackdown Edition

First of all, I want to say, for posterity, that I will never wait in line for an iPhone ever again. They can come out with a 12G dicksucking model next year for all I care - I'm never doing that again. I was in the RESERVE line and it still took 4 hours in 98 degree weather and probable skin cancer to pick up an ultimately defective phone. Four hours! For a phone! I really have lost my mind. For someone who owns so many of them, I don't even really like Apple products, almost solely due to the sealed batteries. Ugh.


Yes, I clicked "Agree" without reading any of the 45 pages of text

But, without further ado (and keeping in mind I've only been using the iPhone for 3 hours), let us commence the smackdown:

AESTHETICS:

Let's get it out of the way: the iPhone is drop-dead gorgeous. I don't need to rehash the specs, but suffice it to say, it looks like something that belongs in a museum. The glass/metal combination give it a classy look and confidence-inspiring heft. When I first handled the Evo, I thought it was pretty nice, but next to the iPhone, the Evo flat-out looks and feels like a cheap toy. That's not an indictment of the Evo - everything looks like a toy next the the iPhone.



Round: iPhone

ERGONOMICS:

Truth be told, I don't find either particularly comfortable to hold next to my ear, but I've felt that way about every wide, flat smartphone I've used. God, I miss the Samsung x105. The iPhone's new sharp edges, while beautiful, don't exactly melt into your fingers. On the other hand, the excessive size of the Evo makes it quite a bit unwieldy in my (admittedly girl-like) hands. I was on the Metro the other day trying to look up Phil Hughes' xFIP with my left hand, and I just couldn't do it because as my thumb was moving around the keyboard, the edge of my palm kept hitting the touch button on the bottom corner of the phone and continually booted me back out into the home screen. Not cool. The iPhone hasn't undergone the Metro test yet, but until then, I guess we can declare it the winner by default.


It's also much, much thinner

Round: iPhone

OS/INTERFACE:

Maybe it's the Windows user in me talking, or maybe I'm just tired of i[Phone]OS, but I prefer Android, hands-down. There's a lot to be said for customizability, and it's telling that it took four iterations of the iPhone before they allowed you to even change the background of your home screen. But it's not just that, it's the little things too. The onscreen keyboard has the symbols above the letters, so you can just hold down the letter to access that symbol, instead of having to hit a separate key to switch the whole keyboard out on the iPhone. More importantly, if you hate the default keyboard on Android, you can just download a new one.



I also really like the little Android guy.



Round: Evo

DISPLAY:

I'm pretty sure that all that "Retina Display" talk was a bunch of hot air, but there's no denying that the iPhone's IPS screen is stunning. It's the nicest screen I've ever seen on any handheld device, with the sharpest text and really eye-popping colors. That's not to say that the Evo's TFT screen is bad (it's certainly got a bit more real estate), but if you put them side-by-side, the difference is noticeable, if not glaring. I don't know if this is a problem with the lower resolution or the limited color palette of the Evo, but some graphics look awful and splotchy, like the blue areas below:



The iPhone renders the same area with slightly more...grace:



Round: iPhone

CALL QUALITY:

They both stink, but for different reasons. The iPhone's sound quality is great, but as I linked to earlier, I can make the phone drop a call by holding it in my left hand. The Evo connects just fine, but then I can't understand what the fuck anyone is saying. I was using it to call Apple support and since I couldn't make out what the guy was trying to say, I basically stopped trying, said "yes" a lot, and when I thought the guy was laughing, I laughed too. That was not a productive call.

Round: Draw

FEATURE SET:

This is where the Evo, whose feature set reads like a trade show tech demo, blows the iPhone out of the water. Facetime wifi video chat? Psh. Please. The Evo does video chat over the CELLULAR network. I hate the idea of video chat anyway because I like attending conference calls in my boxers, but that's neither here nor there. It's got WiMAX 4G (or 3.5G, I should say), and any text input field can be filled in via voice recognition. Not that it works that well all the time, but I appreciate any progress towards the voice-activated computer in Star Trek. Throw in tighter integration with social media and Google cloud services, and the Evo's got more "Ooh" moments. The trade-off is that the battery lasts just a smidge over seventeen seconds, but that's the price of progress. Also, 4G coverage sucks. You can be getting 4G and then walk three steps and then it's gone. But it's cool when it works.

Round: Evo

BATTERY LIFE:

No comparison.

Round: iPhone

APP STORE:

There is little doubt in my mind that given enough time, most of the differences in the respective app stores will eventually even out. But at this juncture, it's hard to argue against the superiority of Apple's offering, especially if you're really into games. Fortunately, my favorite game, Homerun Battle 3D, is available on both iPhone and Android. I bought it twice. For some reason, the game is smoother and faster but with more jagged graphics on iPhone, and choppier, but more anti-aliased on Android.

Round: iPhone

So what is that, 5-2? As much as I'm pulling for the Evo and other assorted Android devices, the iPhone is just a really polished, really slick device, and sad as I am to admit it, at this point I am willing to trade off a little bit of customization ability and get locked into Apple's draconian app requirements for the sake of predictable battery life.

How Much is Time Really Worth?

As the iPhone's retail launch approaches and eBay listings are already rocketing through the stratosphere, I've been thinking about all the people who stand in line for hours and hours and I wonder how much money I personally would be willing to pay online to be able to skip the line (assuming I didn't have a preorder). Probably a lot, I hate waiting in lines.

If your college econ professors are to be believed, you should take your hourly wage and multiply it by however many hours you'd be waiting and that's how much your time is worth. I was delighted with this revelation in college; I think through some absurd reduction of that concept, I even saw an argument that some rich celebrities could pay thousands of dollars to some kid to mow the lawn and they'd still come out on top versus mowing the lawn themselves, because they made more money than that per hour. So if you make $10,000 per hour working but spend an hour mowing the lawn instead, you've essentially lost $10,000 or something like that.

While the concept makes sense, that's just an absurd assertion, as if someone is standing there with a checkbook in hand waiting to pay you your hourly rate for any time you do decide to work. Anyway, I digress.

The real point of this rambling diatribe is to express my frustration (and I don't know why I'm thinking about this now) with the annual March Madness story that invariably comes out and says something like "March Madness Costs Companies $356 Quadrillion in Lost Productivity," and all it does is calculate all the hours that workers will be watching basketball games and multiplies it by their average pay, as if these workers do nothing but work every minute of every day all year long until March Madness rolls around. Usually, if you haven't been fired yet, it's because you get your work done. And if you spend the excess time watching basketball instead of puttering around on Facebook or chatting in the break room, companies aren't actually losing any productivity that they had before. Not that any waste of time should necessarily be condoned, and not that March Madness has no effect, but the stated effects are invariably overstated - by several orders of magnitude.

HTC Evo 4G Longer-Term Impressions

Okay, I've now been using the Evo for almost two weeks now, and at this point I feel like I've put in enough time to confidently say that I'm both impressed and appalled by this phone.

First of all, I have both the screen separation and unresponsive touchscreen problems. My unit has also developed a black spot on the bottom right corner of the screen, and Radio Shack refuses to take it back because they assume it was from dropping the phone, which it isn't, but they won't take my word for it even despite the absence of any physical damage. Sprint won't help me because I bought it at Radio Shack (which, for the record, was one of only two places where you could pre-order in the first place). I had to file an insurance claim for a replacement, but I doubt it will even arrive before my Sprint early cancellation deadline. I'll probably have to unload the replacement on eBay, but I digress.

It amazes me that a phone can get so much right and still get so much head-scratchingly wrong. There are little touches that are really cool, like the proximity sensor that turns off the screen while you're talking on it, and automatically turns it back on when you're done. But most of the time, it doesn't feel like anybody ever spent more than a couple of hours testing its usability. There's a long list of things that I think could have been easily solved:

- There is no bezel surrounding the screen and the row of touch buttons along the bottom are way too close to the edge. If I'm not carefully and gingerly turning the screen from portrait to landscape or vice versa, I ALWAYS hit one of them. Anytime I'm playing a game, I usually hit one while just readjusting my hand. They should have placed them further away or just made them hard buttons.

- The power button is too small and too flush with the casing of the phone.

- When I grip it in landscape mode, my fingers cover up the back speaker.

- The battery is so bad that when I forget to bring the charger to work, I feel the same anxiety I feel when I forget my wallet. I know you can improve battery life somewhat by turning everything off and changing the notification settings to update less frequently, but let's be honest...if I want to manually check my RSS feed every 6 hours, I can do it at a real, actual computer. A phone, I feel, only justifies a premium subscription rate because it can push content to me immediately.

Anyway, I reserved an iPhone. I'm hoping that I can have both at the same time for an old-fashioned smackdown.

Why Armando Galarraga Got Hosed

I've thought a lot about Jim Joyce's blown call on Galarraga's perfect game, and while I think that both have shown incredible grace and class, Bud Selig (surprise!) dropped the ball in his reasoning for refusing to overturn it:

"In this job, precedence [sic] is very important," Selig said. "A lot of people don't really understand that. But it is important. And while you can say, 'This was really aberrational,' there are a lot of situations -- I've had clubs call me and say, 'What about that game I lost, why didn't you think about doing that?' And they were serious."

No, Bud, it is YOU who don't understand precedent, because anybody who brings forth such an argument based on the "precedent" and "slippery slope" it would create has a poor grasp of both logic and baseball history. That is a patently absurd argument.

One of the most common logical fallacies is the argument from precedent, wherein one argues that we cannot make correct decision X because we'd have to also apply the same process in situation Y, because X and Y seem the same. Namely, "we can't overturn this Galarraga call, because then we'd have to overturn every incorrect call ever made!"

Hogwash.

The precedent would only apply to circumstances that are fundamentally THE SAME - when the essential circumstances of X are identical to the essential circumstances of Y. So yes, if you overturned the Galarraga call, you'd have to overturn every other call in which a perfect game was lost on a blown 3rd out call which had no bearing on the outcome of the game. But that's where it ends. Overturning this one doesn't mean jackshit for some random blown call in a Twins game, or even Jeffrey Maier, as much as it pains me to admit. I daresay that its precedential impact on baseball history would be minimal. And besides, why is it better to be wrong in every situation rather than correct in this one and wrong in all the others? Quoth Ralph Waldo Emerson: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

But even setting aside my criticism of this middle school debate tactic, Selig ignores that there already is a precedent, and that precedent is that yes, calls are overturned after the fact. Have we already forgotten the Pine Tar incident? At least now we know where Bud's values lie - being wrong is okay, as long as you're consistently wrong. That must explain the Brewers' closer situation.

At any rate, let's expand instant replay. Better yet, let's replace the home plate ump with K-Zone. We can even program it to eject Milton Bradley at random intervals for added realism.

My, How You've Grown

Everyone's favorite [alleged]* serial rapist quarterback is in the headlines again - but this time for his inevitable interview where he puts on clothes that even I can afford and talks about how much he respects the game and how a subpar upbringing lead to alcohol abuse - maybe even shed a tear or two.

So most of the interview was pretty standard fare, but one line was really surprising:

"I've wanted to apologize to them [fans] for so many things. For being immature, for being dumb, for being young, for not knowing any better."

Fair enough, we are all young and immature at one point, and I still would be, if I was young. But I can accept that through years of life experience, one comes to appreciate his own obligations to society, like paying an honest tax assessment and not raping people. Wait, when was his latest alleged sexual assault?

Oh yeah, MARCH 5TH. Three months ago - when he was young and immature.

*Now I think Ben Roethlisberger's legal team can't sue me. But I dropped out of law school, so fuck if I know for sure.

HTC Evo 4G Impressions

Well, after two years of suffering through Windows Mobile, my cell contract is finally up and I have jumped ship. To Sprint, of all places. The phone that convinced me to sign on (at least for the 30 day evaluation period) is the positively gargantuan but feature-packed HTC Evo 4G.

This is easily the biggest phone I've ever handled, but it's all screen and tapers in the back, so it fits nicely in the hand. The back panel is rubberized and feels very nice, though the plastic trim looks a little bit cheap. The ginormous screen is unlike that of any phone I've ever used before; it makes browsing the web a whole new (and more usable) experience. For the first time, I can load real pc-formatted pages (versus the mobile counterparts) and the experience feels very natural.

It is slim enough to fit into a pocket, but the size does have one drawback - it's very difficult to operate the phone completely one-handed when you have to use the same thumb to press keys on opposite corners of the screen. The back of the phone reveals a most curious design decision by HTC - the camera lens is NOT flush with the back panel, but protrudes by about a millimeter or so. That means that when you set the phone down on its back, it actually rests on the edge of the lens. I am not entirely comfortable with that.


Testing out the 4G, web pages loaded fast - very fast. I'm not sure ten times as quickly, as they claim, but certainly noticeably quicker. The Sense UI "wrapper" is similarly snappy, though it really irritates me that the only way to wake the unit from standby is to press the power button and slide the touch panel down. I understand why they implemented the hard button requirement, to keep your pocket from turning the phone on, but I wish that they had given me the choice to deactivate it when I want to. It's supremely annoying when you're waiting for a video to load and in that time, the phone goes to sleep and you have to press the power button and slide the control to turn it back on.

Other than that, I really like Android and the variety of cool apps in the Android Market, many of them free. That's one of the myriad things I hated about Windows Mobile - there's a tiny library of software, most of it stinks, and they all cost money.



Alas, as many have said before me, the battery is slightly subpar. And by slightly subpar, I mean super power guzzlingly piss-poor. I took the phone off the charger at noon today and got the 15% low battery warning at 7:00. Granted, I was playing around with it a lot and testing all the features, but it was on standby for a large portion of that time (no voice either), and even conservatively, it may be a struggle to hit more than 10 hours in regular usage. I could go two days without plugging in my old smartphone with very light usage. We shall see how it holds up. At the very least, the phone lets you swap out the battery. Kudos also for a standard 3.5mm audio jack.

Overall, I'm very impressed. This is not a phone they'll need to trick anyone into buying by paying a million dollars to shoehorn it into every scene of 24. Prior to its release I was torn between the dreamy spec sheet of the Evo and the upcoming iPhone of indeterminate capability but assured droolworthiness. Frankly, I sort of expected that I would test-drive the Evo for a month and then tire of its annoying quirks and get the iPhone in the end, but now I'm not so sure. It's not as polished or as sexy as the iPhone will be, but I'll say this: it made me smile...more than once. And I never smile.