I’m not sure what Google was expecting, but when you give a phone out to a room of hackers, chances are the phones going to be hacked. First, we saw the EVO get rooted shortly after I/O and now it seems Froyo has been ported over as well. All this before the phone’s even hit the store shelves.
The details haven’t been publicly released yet as hacker ‘toastcfh’ over at the XDA-Developers forums continues to refine the process to ensure it’s easy enough for most people to perform.
Over the last week, during my visit to Paris, I've been using both my regular camera and the EVO 4G I got at Google I/O for taking shots and videos of the beautiful French capital.
So what kind of pictures can you expect from the EVO, which has an 8MP camera and a dual LED flash? Just click on the images below to find out.
The performance of the camera during the day far exceeded my expectations - the pictures come out very sharp and crisp, for a mobile phone camera - it almost seems like there is an image stabilization packed somewhere in there.
Google and Sprint might have a big problem on their hands, as the EVO 4G, coming out in less than a week on June 4th, seems to have a serious defect in the included internal storage department.
After taking a myriad of breathtaking and irreplaceable pictures and videos and coming home, I found none of them were present on the card.
The fees just keep on coming. On top of the $10 per month “you own an EVO fee” and the somewhat more reasonable $29.99 per month fee to tether your devices to the EVO, Android Guys are reporting that if you’re looking forward to the face to face video chat feature on the phone, you should expect to shell out an extra $5 a month.
You can tell Android’s definitely starting to gain momentum as more and more developers are now bringing their popular applications over to the platform. Slingbox have been working on an Android app for a while, and they’ve just posted a video preview over on their Facebook page.
If you’re not familiar with a Slingbox, it’s a device that integrates with your home media center, and allows you to stream and control content from your DVR, TV, or digital cable box to software that runs on a PC or mobile device. Their device doesn’t just stream the actual media though – when using their software, you actually use it just as you would your normal DVR – program guide, DVR menu, all of that can be controlled from the app, giving your full TV experience on the go.
Prospective EVO 4G owners: go ahead and shave $29.99 off your expected monthly bill from Sprint. We’re still over a week away from the official launch of the phone, and it seems that it’s already been rooted. The hackers responsible for the root haven’t released many details at the moment, but they did provide us with several pictures and a video of the hack.
For those unaware (all 3 of you left?), ‘rooting’ a phone is another way of saying that users can now have complete access to a phones operating system (you can see more details here). We’ve covered rooting in the past, and most of the more popular Android phones have been rooted for a while, but the EVO 4G is a bit different.
On day 2 of the Google I/O conference, I spent about 20 minutes talking with a knowledgeable HTC representative at the HTC booth and tried to get some comments on a few questions a lot of you wanted answered.
This information is coming directly from the HTC rep who seemed very knowledgeable. The newly announced Froyo update is not going to be coming to EVO 4G in time for launch on June 4th, contrary to what we thought earlier (i.e. EVO getting an OTA update after the Froyo announcement). HTC only recently got their hands on some Froyo builds and will have to go through the lengthy process of merging their custom Sense UI code with it, which can take months.
After I've finished unboxing the HTC EVO 4G that Google gave out at the Google I/O conference, I started playing with the phone and noting down things that are different from other phones, things that are interesting, and things that bug me.
Note that this is not meant to be a full review - the bullet points are just my first impressions after 2 hours of use. Think of this post as a mini hands-on review:
Wow, Google, I still can't believe after giving out a Droid, you surprised us, Google I/O attendees, with an EVO 4G as well, 2 weeks before it is released to the public.
I unboxed mine this morning and started playing with it right away. Enjoy these unboxing photos (as much as you can enjoy someone else uboxing something you want) as well as a video of EVO 4G playing a Youtube video of a Starcraft 2 match.
First impressions to follow are now live.
And here is a short video. Apologies for the quality of my non-HD Canon SD-450 but it would have been kind of hard to use EVO's HD recording on itself.
As you may know, the HTC EVO 4G comes with a mobile hotspot capability out of the box, even in Android 2.1, for $30 a month.
While Froyo (Android 2.2) will indeed include a similar mobile hotspot capability baked right into the OS, it is unknown at this point whether Sprint will rip it out before shipping to the EVO 4G customers or not.
Regardless of what will happen in the future, we are here now, and Sprint included a mobile hotspot app with the EVO that is in dire need of reviewing.
The application is called Sprint Hotspot and is very straightforward to use.
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