Sprint Unveils HTC Evo 4G Super Phone 284
adeelarshad82 writes "Sprint dropped a bombshell on the CTIA Wireless trade show by unveiling the most powerful Google Android smartphone ever seen in the USA, the WiMAX-powered Evo 4G. The phone runs Android 2.1 on a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8650 chipset along with a helpful 1GB of built-in memory and 512MB of RAM, which is assisted by a MicroSD slot supporting up to 32GB cards. It swaps between EVDO Rev. A, WiMAX and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g on demand. The phone is dominated by a 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 65,000-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel unit on the front. The camera also records 720p, high-def video, which it can play through an HDMI out jack on the bottom. The Evo 4G weighs 170g and measures 120.5 mm by 67 mm by 13 mm. It's expected to hit the market in the summer."
Re:HDMI jack? (Score:4, Insightful)
A phone that records 720p video and plays it out via an HDMI jack? WHY?
You seem to be complaining about the HDMI port. If your phone can record HD video, why WOULDN'T you want to be able to play that on a big display?
Re:YAY! (Score:5, Insightful)
In many confidence games, the 'con man' will use 'shills' or assistants who pretend to be independently interested in the swindle or scam. In modern marketing, it is fairly common for companies to identify natural leaders and people with influence, and offer to pay them to fake spontaneous endorsement of the product. Given those facts, any news or commentary relating to commercially available products must be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism.
Re:It's a TELEPHONE (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you'll find more utility in the tools that you purchase if you stop thinking about them in terms of what a marketer told you and what its potential actually is.
No hardware keyboard... (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad there's no hardware keyboard on this beast. I can't stand using touchscreen keyboards. Hopefully this isn't becoming the norm.
Re:YAY! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true, but regardless of whether or not this is meant as advertising, the introduction of a phone like this into the US market is also certainly newsworthy. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Super Phone? Aw, come on. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:YAY! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me clarify the situation for you: every single story on slashdot can be qualified as advertisement. Every. Single. One. That story about WoW reaching 10M+ players? Advertisement for Blizzard. That story about some guy building a bender robot? Advertising for said guy. That story about a fork in the Linux kernel? Advertising for Linux.
Pointing out that something getting front-page billing on Slashdot is good advertisement for said something is like pointing out the Sun is shining on the Earth: true, but not really useful information. Now, if you would have evidence that Sprint paid CmdrTaco to run this story, this would be an entirely different proposition. However, until you do, you're little more than a blowhard who likes playing Captain Obvious.
Re:Voice? (Score:3, Insightful)
"So you can use voice and data at the same time"
According to http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/23/htc-evo-4g-is-sprints-android-powered-knight-in-superphone-armo/ [engadget.com], Sprint says it is "still in the testing phase". Not sure what this means, but it sounds like they haven't proven it is possible in their current design (or just bad PR).
My guess is it will end up being a pretty high priority.
Re:Memory or storage? (Score:3, Insightful)
That should make you question the accuracy of the rest of the entire article.
Re:The *best* feature: (Score:2, Insightful)
Enjoy your 5GB monthly invisible cap that you'll hit in an hour with 4 teens surfing mytubebook and listening to lasdoralip.fm.
Re:YAY! (Score:4, Insightful)
every single story on slashdot can be qualified as advertisement. Every. Single. One.
So by that logic, a story about a congressional hearing is an advertisement for that hearing? A story about someone's rights being violated or a major patent lawsuit is an advertisement? Wiktionary says that an advertisement [wiktionary.org] is "A commercial solicitation designed to sell some commodity, service or similar." That sounds a lot like this story, but nothing at all like a quote from Torvalds or a move by the FCC, which is the kind of info /. made it's name on.
That said, you are actually more and more right every day, in the sense that slashdot has become a big target for viral marketing, which is probably how this story got posted. If one thinks of slashdot as a bulletin board, one forgets that there are editors. If one looks at it as a news aggregator, one gets a little closer to the truth, but since news in general becomes more and more viral every day, it's even hard to say that much. Basically its a sounding board for whatever the editors think is cool. Apparently they think this phone is cool. I think they are spending too much time on this kind of crap and ignoring other, more important stories. But that's just my opinion...