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[Official] Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE Pre-release thread - Sprint official launch is Saturday, June 2

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It seems that people like to hate on HTC. First, the 3vo wasn't acceptable because it had 3D. Up until the Rezound, it was the best HTC. And now I'm reading the hate out there spill over from the Rezound to the One and EL TEvo. And the cause??

Beats. Beats is a gimmick, HTC is screwing us again with a gimmick.

Sigh. I don't get it. I don't use every feature that they build in to phones.

And what are common cell phone complaints? Audio quality and camera. I am not a Beats fan (at all) but at what point will the blog posters cut HTC some slack? I see them as trying to give people what they want. Beats, like it or not, is a premium audio feature. Image Sense is a premium camera feature.

And we got the S4 and a little larger battery happening here.

The best I can do is to ignore the haters, but I just needed to vent that steam.
 
Skid71 said:
Care to speculate on the impact this (different processors) wil/could have on battery performance of the LTEvo vs One X?

Skid
Click to expand...
If you compare the International One X and One S reviews (Tegra 3 and S4 Krait, respectively) from Engadget and The Verge, both have commented in surprise that the One S appears to be doing quite a bit better in terms of battery life than the One X, despite trading different blows on performance benchmarks.

There are a number of variables still, the One S has a slightly smaller battery, depending on the composition of the battery tests, the AMOLED display can be an advantage/disadvantage (a light vs. dark image), and the resolutions are different between the phones.

However, it does appear that the S4 Krait will be competitive in terms of battery life.
 
NeoteriX said:
If you compare the International One X and One S reviews (Tegra 3 and S4 Krait, respectively) from Engadget and The Verge, both have commented in surprise that the One S appears to be doing quite a bit better in terms of battery life than the One X, despite trading different blows on performance benchmarks.

There are a number of variables still, the One S has a slightly smaller battery, depending on the composition of the battery tests, the AMOLED display can be an advantage/disadvantage (a light vs. dark image), and the resolutions are different between the phones.

However, it does appear that the S4 Krait will be competitive in terms of battery life.
Click to expand...

I appreciate your time in answering. Sure, it's just speculation, but your answer is my hope for the LTEvo.

Skid
 
EarlyMon said:
It seems that people like to hate on HTC. First, the 3vo wasn't acceptable because it had 3D. Up until the Rezound, it was the best HTC. And now I'm reading the hate out there spill over from the Rezound to the One and EL TEvo. And the cause??

Beats. Beats is a gimmick, HTC is screwing us again with a gimmick.

Sigh. I don't get it. I don't use every feature that they build in to phones.

And what are common cell phone complaints? Audio quality and camera. I am not a Beats fan (at all) but at what point will the blog posters cut HTC some slack? I see them as trying to give people what they want. Beats, like it or not, is a premium audio feature. Image Sense is a premium camera feature.

And we got the S4 and a little larger battery happening here.

The best I can do is to ignore the haters, but I just needed to vent that steam.
Click to expand...

To a certain extent, I do agree about "Beats." I think they marketed the product just as well as Apple markets all their products, which contributed to the general public's view that it's the "best thing since sliced bread." In reality, Beats audio is outsourced from Monster...which, in the audio world is "overpriced" and "over-rated." They brought Dr. Dre in, to use his name and likeness to help sell the product to the general public. The guy is a living legend, as both a producer and artist, so brilliant move there.

I don't know if I would necessarily say that it's HTC that gets the hate or if people are just out to find deficiencies, in order to feel better about themselves (aka "crab mentality"). In this case, with regards to "Beats," it shouldn't matter because unlike the headphones, the price of the phone didn't go up by $100-200 dollars, just because of the name and likeness being attached to the phone.

With the 3D, I just personally couldn't deal with it. My eyes were too sensitive and couldn't find a way to cope without getting dizzy. Then once the Photon was announced, with the kickstand, it pushed me away further.
 
Skid71 said:
Care to speculate on the impact this (different processors) wil/could have on battery performance of the LTEvo vs One X?

Skid
Click to expand...

Better runtime battery performance on the S4. Not only because of the smaller manufacturing process (that's very significant) but also because of the way that the asynchronously clocked cores on the S4 consume power. On this design, the two cores will run at whatever speed needed, including shutting down one core if it's not required.

You'll be able to read a lot of blog posts that contradict me on the power advantage of asynchronously clocked cores, but their information comes from a paper, just for bloggers, written by nVidia (maker of the T3). Theoretically, the asynchronously clocked S4 cores can consume the same as a an ARM processor, but in real life practical applications, it doesn't.

The T3 is an ARM-9 design. The S4 isn't an ARM at all, but compares to an ARM-15. So its two cores will compute things faster than 4 ARM-9 cores, as a general rule of thumb.

Two processors spending less time to get things done drawing much less power than 4 cores - advantage S4.

Standby is another matter. There, I expect the T3 to excel because it has a 5th (companion) core specifically designed for low power consumption (at the expense of speed) that gets switched to automatically when the phone doesn't have much to do.

In general, if you use your phone much, my money is on the S4 for best battery overall. If you are a low to moderate user, the T3 should have the edge.

We'll have to see what comes true upon delivery, but so far my track record on this isn't too bad.
 
EarlyMon said:
It seems that people like to hate on HTC. First, the 3vo wasn't acceptable because it had 3D. Up until the Rezound, it was the best HTC. And now I'm reading the hate out there spill over from the Rezound to the One and EL TEvo. And the cause??

Beats. Beats is a gimmick, HTC is screwing us again with a gimmick.

Sigh. I don't get it. I don't use every feature that they build in to phones.

And what are common cell phone complaints? Audio quality and camera. I am not a Beats fan (at all) but at what point will the blog posters cut HTC some slack? I see them as trying to give people what they want. Beats, like it or not, is a premium audio feature. Image Sense is a premium camera feature.

And we got the S4 and a little larger battery happening here.

The best I can do is to ignore the haters, but I just needed to vent that steam.
Click to expand...

I was of your mentality about the 3D feature on the 3vo. Not to mention I really liked (and still do) taking pictures and video in 3D. But it turns out that the feature was just too polarizing, and people made decisions to pass on a good phone simply because of its inclusion. Whether they did so based on reviews or on their own conclusion isn't relevant to me. People went to the MoPho and E4GT, and the Evo community shrank. A lot.

Couple that with the extra effort required to get the 3D camera to work (in custom AOSP ROMs as well as potentially the official ICS ROM), the decision to include 3D was a bad one.

While Beats might not have the same issue regarding upgrades, it's potentially another polarizing feature. From what I've seen, some people love it and some people hate it. Given that HTC invested in Beats during their period of some bad business decisions (IMO), the fact that they are still including Beats in their phone implies that more people like it than hate it... Either that, or they are still trying to justify the huge amount of $$ they wasted on it.

I only recently learned that Monster Cable is the company that was manufacturing the Beats headphones. Given my opinion of this company based on their ripoff A/V cables and flat out marketing lies, it makes me despise Beats even more. From this angle alone, I consider any backlash from Beats to be perfectly justified. HTC did the right thing to remove the headphones.

I for one consider Beats a gimmick because I see it as a glorified equalizer preset wrapped around a celebrity name. But I have the sense not to disregard the rest of the phone. At the same time, I have a hard time defending the 'feature' against the critics.
 
I would venture to guess that the general market using their cell phones for music are mainly listening to hip hop, rap and pop using undersampled MP3 files.

I submit two things - including Beats headphones has not materially added to the price of HTC phones (nowhere near what they cost retail) and for the market I described, Beats is definitely a premium audio feature.

I recall clearly at the Evo launch that there were a lot of threads complaining about the plain vanilla audio system that phone had and how it failed compared to the Zune.

Beats hate is simply recycling that.

I wish that they would include the headset. I would try it to say that I had, and then give them to a youngster who would treasure them.

While we're on the subject of audio quality, the first metric in audio is, believe it or not, volume. And how much fine volume control comes on an Android? Last I checked, about 15 points on the slider - iow, not much.
 
EarlyMon said:
I would venture to guess that the general market using their cell phones for music are mainly listening to hip hop, rap and pop using undersampled MP3 files.

I submit two things - including Beats headphones has not materially added to the price of HTC phones (nowhere near what they cost retail) and for the market I described, Beats is definitely a premium audio feature.

I recall clearly at the Evo launch that there were a lot of threads complaining about the plain vanilla audio system that phone had and how it failed compared to the Zune.

Beats hate is simply recycling that.

I wish that they would include the headset. I would try it to say that I had, and then give them to a youngster who would treasure them.

While we're on the subject of audio quality, the first metric in audio is, believe it or not, volume. And how much fine volume control comes on an Android? Last I checked, about 15 points on the slider - iow, not much.
Click to expand...

Very good points, EM. Although I am in the general market using my cell phone to listen to music (both in the car and on the go), I find that the audio has always been sufficient enough for my needs (especially after downloading the PowerAmp music player). With or without Beats, I personally would feel that the LTEvo is an outstanding offering from HTC. That said, I think adding "Beats" has more benefits from a marketing standpoint, more-so than the actual audio standpoint. It's defenitely a step up from "standard" audio that's made available for cell phones, but as far as what Beats provides from an overall standpoint, that's a completely different story.

As for the headphones...I'm okay with them not being in there because I'd imagine, the mark-up to include the headphones would at least be $50. Granted, the beats earpiece headphones could be turned around and sold to make up that difference, I still prefer the lower price of the phone over the headphones being included.
 
EarlyMon said:
Better runtime battery performance on the S4. Not only because of the smaller manufacturing process (that's very significant) but also because of the way that the asynchronously clocked cores on the S4 consume power. On this design, the two cores will run at whatever speed needed, including shutting down one core if it's not required.

You'll be able to read a lot of blog posts that contradict me on the power advantage of asynchronously clocked cores, but their information comes from a paper, just for bloggers, written by nVidia (maker of the T3). Theoretically, the asynchronously clocked S4 cores can consume the same as a an ARM processor, but in real life practical applications, it doesn't.
Click to expand...

Just to add some color to the discussion: if I remember correctly, Anand from AnandTech seems to share the skepticism in the benefits to asynchronous cores. In his view, these power/efficiency savings are just as achievable through smart and aggressive power gating. Apparently in the non-mobile world, the benefits of asynch cores haven't proven themselves (I've posted one quote below, but I know another discussion exists elsewhere)

In my view, Anand is one of the few best independent tech writers/bloggers today, and so he's not the type to regurgitate marketing material like many other bloggers are notorious for.

Qualcomm is particularly proud of its ability to run each core at a frequency independent of the other. I haven't been able to demonstrate a tangible advantage to this feature yet and Qualcomm hasn't announced whether it will be present in future SoCs as well so the verdict is still out on this one.

Source: AnandTech - HTC EVO 3D vs. Motorola Photon 4G: Choosing the Best Sprint Phone
Click to expand...
 
re: The Beats Audio thing:

I seem to recall when HP starting branding with Beats Audio on their laptops, they claimed to be improving the actual audio hardware in the laptops -- outfitting the audio subsystem/pipeline with audiophile quality DACs, better quality OMAMPs, etc.

Having toyed with the freaks at Head-Fi (and I use that term lovingly), these components can play a huge part in sound -- and Apple (from what I remember so I could be wrong) has stuck to using well-regarded Wolfson DACs.

Does anyone know if the Beats Audio here in the LTE Evo and the HTC One series -- is it just a software/EQ thing, or is there actual hardware in the form of a better DAC and OPAMPS?
 
NeoteriX said:
re: The Beats Audio thing:

I seem to recall when HP starting branding with Beats Audio on their laptops, they claimed to be improving the actual audio hardware in the laptops -- outfitting the audio subsystem/pipeline with audiophile quality DACs, better quality OMAMPs, etc.

Having toyed with the freaks at Head-Fi (and I use that term lovingly), these components can play a huge part in sound -- and Apple (from what I remember so I could be wrong) has stuck to using well-regarded Wolfson DACs.

Does anyone know if the Beats Audio here in the LTE Evo and the HTC One series -- is it just a software/EQ thing, or is there actual hardware in the form of a better DAC and OPAMPS?
Click to expand...

It's hardware, but to add to my theory on Beats being a little overblown, I guess even in this case, Monster's not involved anymore:
Beats and Monster going their separate ways leaving HTC in limbo
Maybe that explains the lack of inclusion of headphones?

Interestingly enough, I didn't realize that HTC was #5 out of all the manufacturers. I guess they're hoping that the One series phones will bring them back (From what I've seen, they're on the right track):
Maximum PC | HTC Profits Plummet 70 Percent in Q1 2012
 
I've corresponded privately with some of the Anand staff, and we have mutual respect. They have corrected an article or two based on my inputs, but not this one.

Yes, you can get there with smart power management, but it's nice when you don't have to.

As for what's inside EL TEvo - my kingdom for a schematic!
 
NeoteriX said:
Does anyone know if the Beats Audio here in the LTE Evo and the HTC One series -- is it just a software/EQ thing, or is there actual hardware in the form of a better DAC and OPAMPS?
Click to expand...

I've been wondering this too, and hoping for an actual hardware/baseline utilization (DACS/OPAMPS/converters/codecs/Firmware/Amplification/output) upgrade to the 3.5mm port rather than just topside Software Enhancements/EQ tweaks/UI. Which is mostly what Beats seems to be to me. EQ Tweaks and enhancements can only go so far. I don't think we will know for sure until the phone releases or we get a detailed blueprint of the hardware if it is different than the norm.

Looking at the pictures with the back off it does reveal a slightly different looking 3.5mm headphone jack input when comparing it to the Evo 3D. They look similar, except the 3D has an extra plastic shield/retainer over it and the 4G LTE has a metal shield and bracket? Maybe the 4G LTE has a revised version of the 3D's? It doesn't look markedly different from the outside, but as you know we need to see the guts. Nothing is mentioned on any spec sheets, so all we can do is speculate. If it was something special I would think they would call it out as a "feature". Just saying Beats Enhancements as a blanket statement screams 'empty marketing buzzwords' to some people, which I think is why alot are questioning and using the G(immick) word?

Not the best picture of the Evo 4G LTE with the back off:
htc-evo-4g-lte-hands-on-DSC_0725-rm-verge-1020_gallery_post.jpg


Other angle, in focus at least:
286510-htc-evo-4g-lte.jpg
 
PyroSporker said:
It doesn't look markedly different from the outside, but as you know we need to see the guts. Nothing is mentioned on any spec sheets, so all we can do is speculate. If it was something special I would think they would call it out as a "feature". Just saying Beats Enhancements as a blanket statement screams 'empty marketing buzzwords' to some people, which I think is why alot are questioning and using the G(immick) word?
[/img]
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Yeah, the plastic cladding is concealing far too much. It looks we'll have to wait for a tear down from isuppli, chipworks, or ifixit.
 
Build quality on this thing looks amazing! Can't wait to hold one in hand and stare at that awesome 4.7in SLCD2 720p screen. Awesome.
 
Uh-oh, this doesn't sound very positive. A possible shortage of 28nm GPUs and or CPUs is being rumored. The One S is shipping now despite the rumor so lets just hope that HTC has an inside track with them since they are both Taiwan based companies, though with Qualcomm in between them who knows...?

If true, I hope HTC doesn't burn their supply on One S's and One XL's (U.S.) before the Evo 4G LTE is supposed to hit shelves.

TSMC claimed facing major 28nm shortage until fall | Electronista
 
We always have to be concerned about supply.

However - as Electronista notes, their source is DigiTimes, hardly reliable.

I am not at liberty to say which parts, but some of the Electronista comments in that article are immature and made from whole cloth.

It may be worthwhile noting that Electronista is owned by MacNN, a very popular Apple site. ;) :)
 
novox77 said:
I was of your mentality about the 3D feature on the 3vo. Not to mention I really liked (and still do) taking pictures and video in 3D. But it turns out that the feature was just too polarizing, and people made decisions to pass on a good phone simply because of its inclusion. Whether they did so based on reviews or on their own conclusion isn't relevant to me. People went to the MoPho and E4GT, and the Evo community shrank. A lot.

Couple that with the extra effort required to get the 3D camera to work (in custom AOSP ROMs as well as potentially the official ICS ROM), the decision to include 3D was a bad one.
Click to expand...

I didn't realize how much I missed the Evo community (not just here but everywhere) until the LTEvo was announced. I loved my old Evo, but for various reasons was looking to replace it. I seriously considered the 3vo, but ultimately settled on the Photon. It wasn't the 3D that turned me off, however, but the better volume and sound quality of the Photon. I actually kinda liked the 3D once I got a chance to play with it, but to me the 3vo sounded sort of muddy.

Call me crazy, but I'm one of those people who wants their smartphone to first and foremost work as a phone. For me, the Photon was a better fit in that regard than the 3vo. Now, however, with the LTEvo, I'm looking forward to potentially rejoining the Evo community. Even if I don't, this past week or so has been fun.
 
I'm intrigued by the possibilities of HD Voice.
My mom is upgrading in August and I'll be her guinea pig for the LTEvo.'

Any speculation on what type of hardware is needed for HD Voice? I understand that both handsets have to have the capability. What type of tower hardware is needed?

I'm not asking this right... Can we expect a lengthy rollout time for this feature, or should it be faster than Wimax or LTE rollout?

Skid
 
Citizen Coyote said:
I didn't realize how much I missed the Evo community (not just here but everywhere) until the LTEvo was announced. I loved my old Evo, but for various reasons was looking to replace it. I seriously considered the 3vo, but ultimately settled on the Photon. It wasn't the 3D that turned me off, however, but the better volume and sound quality of the Photon. I actually kinda liked the 3D once I got a chance to play with it, but to me the 3vo sounded sort of muddy.

Call me crazy, but I'm one of those people who wants their smartphone to first and foremost work as a phone. For me, the Photon was a better fit in that regard than the 3vo. Now, however, with the LTEvo, I'm looking forward to potentially rejoining the Evo community. Even if I don't, this past week or so has been fun.
Click to expand...

Ditto (with exception to the 3D part because that did bug me)! I'm so torn because I've loved having and using the Photon for the past 3/4 of a year. I'll likely have decided once I'm able to see both this and the Motorola offering (if there is one) in person.

The extra height and width to the phone may still be an issue for me, just based on my feeling comfortable holding the phone. Then again, there was an adjustment period for me when I got the original EVO too. I'm just glad that June and July are not too far away.
 
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