A little over a week ago, I picked up my first Android phone, the EVO 4G on Sprint. For a year before that I was using a Palm Pre, so I thought I’d take some time to do a comparison between the two.

Hardware:

In terms of hardware, the phones couldn’t be much more different. In terms of size, the EVO is considerably larger with a 4.3″ screen rather than the Pre’s 3.1″. Screen resolutions scale appropriately, with the Pre running on 320×480 and the EVO on 480×800. The Palm Pre is a vertical slider with a physical QWERTY keyboard, while the EVO uses a soft keyboard. The Pre has a 3MP camera while the EVO features two: an 8MP camera on the back and a 1.3MP on the front for video calls.

At first I thought the EVO’s massive size would be a problem, but after a day or so of use it felt perfectly natural to hold and fits fine in my pockets. Also on the outside of the device, the EVO features a kickstand, presumably for when watching video, as well as an HDMI port for outputting to a TV, which I have yet to test.

Internally, there’s a lot of difference as well. The Pre runs on a 500MHz TI OMAP processor, where the EVO has a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. The RAM has doubled as well, from 256MB to 512MB (although due to a software bug, Android 2.1 can only address the first half of that, this is supposedly fixed in 2.2, as well as some custom ROMs). The Pre has 8GB of internal memory, while the EVO has 1GB along with an expandable 8GB via micro SD.

And of course, there’s the Sprint 4G radio in the EVO, but since Louisville isn’t even on the roadmap for that yet, I’ve been unable to test it.

The closest thing I have to a benchmark utility for these phones is Sunspider, so here goes: (single run each, both on WiFi, totally non-scientific, lower is better)

Palm Pre: 30480.0ms

HTV EVO 4G: 13165.8ms

and, for fun:

Dragon (Core i7, Ubuntu, Chromium): 389.2ms

Software

This is what was most appealing to me about the new phone. The Palm Pre ran on Palm’s webOS which, while nice, doesn’t have the same development community that Android does. The EVO is running on Google’s Android operating system, currently the latest (stable!) version, 2.1.

Surprisingly, there were actually a good number of software elements that I miss from the old phone. First up is cardview, the method that Palm uses to handle multitasking which basically puts each app in its own “card” that can be switched between and then tossed off the screen to close. Android, on the other hand, leaves most apps running in the background after close, and instead of cards, a long press of the home key brings up a list of the six most recently used apps (whether they’re still running or not). If you want to access a running app older than that, you’ll have to find it’s icon and launch it that way.

Another oddity in Android is the way apps seem to “stack.” For example, if I’m in the Reddit app and I click on a link, it opens in the web browser. However, if I now hit the “back” key, I’m taken back into the Reddit app. In situations like this, it makes sense, but I’ve run into a couple of cases where I’m taken between apps unexpectedly by the back button. In general, apps don’t seem as contained as they did in webOS.

Another small touch that I miss from webOS is screen rotation. While Android will rotate the screen automatically, it does so instantly with no sort of animation for the transition, where Palm had the screen rotate and expand, which gave it a nice appearance.

Synchronization with web services is just as good if not better than on webOS, especially if those services are run by Google. I was already using Google Voice to manage my voicemail, but now I’m moving towards using it for more, since I have a good level of integration with my phone. I also now have proper support for Google Latitude without having to hack in support as well as a much more full-featured Maps application in general, with Street View and Turn by Turn Navigation.

The amount of available software for Android is one of the big reasons I decided to switch to the platform. Apps that I’ve found without equivalent on webOS include: Dropbox (for accessing my cloud-stored files), Layar (an augmented reality app that for now is more of a toy since I’ve yet to figure out how to use it properly), Mint (frontend to Mint.com, a financial management service), Shazam (for identifying music), and XBMC Remote (lets me browse and control playback for my media PC). Upcoming apps seem to include Audible (I’ve already played with the beta client), Kindle, and Netflix. And that doesn’t even take into account all of the Google services I was unable to use before, like Earth, Goggle, Latitude, Buzz, Sky Map, etc.

Since the Android SDK is based on Java rather than Palm’s Javascript based solution, apps seem to have better control of the hardware, which allows for some of these cooler apps to exist. One of my favorite features is the barcode scanning ability, which allows you to, among other things, install apps from the web by scanning a barcode off your computer screen.

I’ve yet to get into running custom ROMs on my EVO, but I’ve been following the development pretty closely and will probably give one of them a spin in the near future, especially if they can get Froyo working well.