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.