David Pogue Reviews Sprint’s HTC Evo

Sounds great: the Wi-Fi hotspot drains a full battery charge in an hour, you can’t get a full day of stand-by out of a full charge, it takes six minutes to connect to 4G (if you happen to live in one of the few cities with 4G coverage), and as for video calling:

After two days of fiddling, downloading and uninstalling apps, manually force-quitting programs and waiting for servers to be upgraded, I finally got video calling to work — sort of. Sometimes there was only audio and a black screen, sometimes only a freeze-frame; at best, the video was blocky and the audio delay absurd.

To make video calling work, you have to install an app yourself: either Fring or Qik. But we never did get Fring to work, and Qik requires people you call to press a Talk button when they want to speak. The whole thing is confusing and, to use the technical term, iffy.

★ Thursday, 17 June 2010