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.

Oh Those Crazy Asians!

Now, as someone who is outwardly Asian, I will be the first to admit that Asians have some of the most terrible ideas, like eating dogs or using chopsticks instead of a fork. But one thing I think they got right: taking off your shoes when you enter someone's house.

I just don't get how it's okay to wear your shoes inside. You know what kind of shit people step in while they're walking around outside? Dog shit. Bird shit. Mud. Chewing gum. Dried crusty vomit. Puddles of urine pooled underneath the urinal. Oftentimes, this is unavoidable, and I understand that. But how did it become acceptable to track all the detritus you've collected under the sole of your shoe right onto the carpet? This ass-backwards society freaks out when someone dips their chip into the cheese twice in a row but thinks nothing of smearing fucking dog shit right where I stick my head when I'm looking under the couch for the chinchilla when he's escaped.

So I don't understand why people look so perplexed when I take off my shoes at the door. It's not an Asian thing--it's a common sense thing.