Tag Archives: Palm

HTC EVO 4G

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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.

My Short Summer

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I’m in the middle of my short break following Summer semester at UofL.  I’m very happy to finally have classes done with for the semester, and look forward to (hopefully) going back to work soon.  I’ve been talking to people at VMware for the last couple of weeks, and so far everything seems to be in order, and I’ll know for certain soon.  However, rent at the apartment complex in San Francisco I lived in last time has shot up $300 (to $1900/mo).

Since Palm released the Mojo SDK, I’ve been spending some time tinkering with it and developing some basic applications.  I’m hoping to start work on a bigger webOS project soon, though I’m not entirely sure what that will be (I do have some ideas). I’ve also been playing around with several of the apps in Precentral’s homebrew section. In particular, I really love the Prepod app, which is a podcast streamer/downloader that lets me listen to my podcasts over the air, specifically in my car.  It needs just a *little* more polish, but then it’s easily worth a few dollars on the official app store (whenever Palm decides to open that up).

Lately, I’ve been drooling over the new 13″ unibody Macbook Pro, but there are a couple of things keeping me from pulling the trigger on one, not the least of which is my current lack of money.  However, the upcoming release of Snow Leopard and (supposedly) Core i7 mobile are keeping me from buying one just yet.

I’ve been spending my Thursdays for the last couple of months at Flanagan’s, a pub over on Baxter Ave. that has a weekly Pint Night, where two special beers are rolled out, including glasses from the brewery that you get to take home with you (and are already taking over all my available cabinet space).  So far, all the beers I’ve tried there have been fairly interesting, and it’s been a great way to discover new beers.  At first, it was just 3 or 4 of us going every week, but it’s slowly been growing and now we actually have a pretty good crowd, mostly members from Speed’s ACM.

That’s pretty much all I’ve been up to lately, besides burning through my Netflix queue and poking around online, maybe I’ll write something again when I have something more interesting to report.

One week with the Pre

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Time for another update.  First up, apps!

Since the Pre released, several additional applications have appeared in the “App Catalog,” and I’ve been playing with most of them.

I got my Pandora account working on my phone after emailing support, and I have to say, it’s a great little app.  I put in a few of my favorite artists and just let it go.  The popup notifications on a new song are nice, as I’m generally doing something else while listening, and they allow me to easily control the player without switching applications.

I was also excited to see the Evernote app show up yesterday, but it seems to have a pretty glaring bug: I can’t scroll horizontally.  Most of my handwritten notes only show the left side on the Pre, and I can’t scroll across to see the whole note, nor can I resize the note or switch to landscape mode.

Also, Tweed started playing nicer once I turned off notifications, which prevented it from automatically refreshing in the background.

As for the device itself, I have actually been having some problems lately.  First, in the web browser, sometimes it won’t finish loading and/or rendering the page.  This happens both on Sprint’s 3G network as well as wifi.  Resetting the device fixes the problem temporarily, as does simply waiting and trying the browser again later, but it’s a very annoying issue.

The second problem I ran into was hardware-related.  After reseating the battery, my keyboard would not work.  The phone ran fine, and I could use the touchscreen, but not the physical keyboard.  I tried several things, including doing a factory-reset of the phone, but they didn’t help.  However, taking the battery out and reseating it again eventually fixed the issue.

Finally, since reseting my device, it doesn’t seem to want to fully sync over my Google Calendar.  It shows events more than a couple weeks old and events a couple weeks from now, but nothing in-between.  There are some annoying work arounds online, but I’m hoping the issue gets resolved soon.

So far, I’m still enjoying the device, even with it’s quirks, as I assume(hope) that most of these are being worked on and will be addressed in upcoming WebOS updates.