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After years on the 'trailing edge,' I bit the bullet and bought a Sprint (News - Alert) HTC EVO, one of the three current 'It' phones moving into the mobile world -- the others being the iPhone 4 and Droid Incredible by HTC (Add the Motorola (News - Alert) Droid X if you want to wait a couple of weeks). 

I've had the EVO for about two weeks and there's a lot to like out of the Android phone, a bit of annoyance, and some stay-tuned issues that deserve further examination.

From a first-time-user perspective, I love the EVO's 4.3 inch screen and the fast response time driven by the 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. The smartphone comes pre-loaded with Android 2.1 and a bunch of HTC (News - Alert) and Sprint applications, with dedicated 'windows' to bookmarks for the web browser and a simple Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn client called FriendStream.   The 8 megapixel camera has proven it can take good pictures and it also does voice calling well.

Power consumption/battery life is a manageable issue and one subject to personal preference. My conservative preference would be for Sprint and HTC to default EVO with all the radios but the 3G/voice one off, then prompt the use for turning on the other radios with a one-time messaging describing the consequences of having the GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and 4G radios tuned on. Instead, if memory serves, the EVO has the 3G, 4G, and GPS radios on by default.  

Most of my annoyances come out of little things. The packaging for the EVO may be environmentally friendly, but it also looks cheap and not something you'd expect to hold a $475 list price phone. The web browser doesn't allow you to drag-and-drop, er, push-and-drag bookmarks around to organize them the way you want; instead, you can sort them a couple of different ways. There's also no clean path to syncing with Windows Live for mail and calendaring, the freebies you get with Windows Vista these days; fortunately, Microsoft (News - Alert) has just released a tweaked mobile version. And having to crank up a Google account for downloading Android apps is one of those *sigh* moments because I already have too many scattered passwords and email accounts as it is.

Which brings me to the meta-headache: The smartphone is a new computer with a different operating system, so integrating it with my existing network and computers requires some work -- there's no point-and-click or plug-and-play here when it comes to setting up email or calendaring or file sharing unless you default to Google for everything...which I don't want to do. So I am running a just-released Windows Live Mobile for calendaring and had to type in my various email accounts manually -- it would be nice (Developers, are you listening?) to have a portable and universal email server 'card' format to deal with this sort of thing.

In the stay-tuned category, I haven't tried tethering yet and will likely give PDANet a go when I travel at the end of the month. I haven't tried the WiFi hotspot capability yet, but that's $30 a month for activating it, so I'm going to wait and see what happens when Android 2.2 ships out with its native hotspot capability.

Finally, WiMAX (News - Alert) 4G -- one of the main selling points of EVO that costs me $10 per month extra -- doesn't work so well in my Northern Virginia neighborhood. Washington D.C. has just been turned up by Clear in the last 30 days as a WiMAX city, but the coverage I've seen has been sporadic. I've seen good 4G signal in Alexandria, but there was nothing around the National Mall and the Smithsonian museums (Air and Space, Natural History) I visited two weeks ago. 

A Clear representative I spoke to back in early June said that coverage around DC should be 'good' and the company would steadily flesh out WiMAX coverage into the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs in the months ahead.