sprint, htc evo, fort collins, booya!

 

The problem with being a nerd is that you’ve had a peek into the sausage factory and you can see that they’re pumping out oodles of delicious looking meatamins so you think about running over and just sticking your mouth at the end of the line. But you know that at some point, the jalapeño trucks are gonna start rollin’ in and then you’ll be in hog heaven. At least until they colocate a Velveeta factory next door and just stick a giant plasticine flavor tube directly onto the assembly line for extra jamazing. So you think you’ll at least hold off until that happens, until you hear rumors swirling about a magical machine being developed that can actually wrap bacon around the sausages, instantly deep-fry them, and just as instantly flash-freeze them so that all you have to do is wave them at a microwave and et voila! flavor country! So you wait for that.

Thing is, if you wait long enough, you’ll be dead. So at some point, you just have to pull the trigger. Which I did this week by accepting the idea that I’ll have an extremely powerful computer near my crotch at all times [shooting invisible wireless signals six ways til Tuesday] for the next few years. Or perhaps the rest of my life.

I’m sad to give up my trusty Motorola L2. It made phone calls. It received phone calls. I even figured out how to text last year. And it was pink! — world’s greatest Rorschach test when I pulled it out in public and got every reaction under the sun. Life was good.

But the time had come, said the Walrus. And since I always listen to talking marine mammals, I found myself drawn towards the new hawtness, that being the HTC EVO.

I’d been a loyal ATT customer for years and was actually eligible for iPhone4, but there were several compelling reasons for me to jump ship. Namely, the recurring costs which far outweigh the initial acquisition costs were far superior on Sprint. For a flat $80 / month, you get what you should, i.e., free calling to any mobile on any network (not just Sprint), unlimited data, and unlimited texting. ATT just want to nickle and dime you to death and Verizon are even worse.

That’s how I recommend picking a phone, btw. Choose your carrier (and a plan) first, then figure out the phone you want. It really cuts through a lot of the noise about phone X having the frobnitz while phone Y has a new and improved gewgaw. Who cares? Over time, you pay so much to the carrier that thinking about it in terms of mere hardware features is a little silly.

Which is not to say that hardware is irrelevant. But the lovely thing about constant improvements in technology is that by now, every carrier’s flagship phone has more or less achieved hardware parity. Sure, iPhone4 has a fancy screen and internal gyroscope, but the EVO’s screen is bigger and has better cameras. I claim it’s a matter of taste.

But if you accept that the carrier is the most important driver in choosing a phone, then you really want to know if your phone will work where you plan on being. That’s what made me most nervous about going with Sprint, but after today, I’m happy to report that at least in Fort Collins, there’s nothing to worry about.

I took the phone for a test bike ride, up to the mailboxes of Rist, and the EVO worked great.

Check out the link — it was able to pick up a GPS signal the entire way. If you click on the part that says “Rist Mailboxes (End)” you get a nice little graph of what the phone was able to record. [Ignore the pitifully slow time.] That graph was automatically made and uploaded with the Google “My Tracks” app, which is free and essentially does what any standalone Garmin unit might do but without poxy proprietary software. That sound you hear is the town of Olathe, KS collectively pooping its pants right now.

The photo above was taken from my favorite spot in all of Fort Collins, the top of Bingham Hill (which is the first little pointy bump around mile 5 and also mile 18 in the graph above). The 3G signal was great; I had no issues uploading the photo to twitpic and writing a jawesome tweet about it. [Well, other than the issue of me being a gigantic dork, but that's out of scope for this blog post.]

Oh, and the best part? I was streaming Pandora the entire time, and never had to stop listening to sweet sounds of Latin guitar picking, not even while taking the photo or the uploading thereof. Pandora even worked up Rist, although it was a bit fiddly. Once I got about 2 miles into the canyon, it stopped playing after each track. Taking the phone out and staring at it intently seemed to fix the issue, but that got annoying, so I just flipped over to the locally stored music after a while (Flobots ftw!). I did confirm that at the actual mailboxes, Pandora was able to stream, so someone with more patience than me could theoretically have been rocking out the entire ride.

So there ya go. Sprint 3G in Fort Collins is strong like bull. Add in great apps like deep Google voice integration, free turn-by-turn (with voice!) navigation, bla bla bla goose! bla bla bla and of course, the cheaper monthly cost of Sprint, and you’ve got a compelling story.

A final note on battery life. If you use a device a lot, especially a device with lots of antennae, of course the battery life will be bad. Think of the antennae as literally shooting power beams into outer space whenever they’re active. So how do you conserve power? Turn off the antennae you’re not using.

I wish I got paid to write this, since Sprint literally just got 1000 words of free advertising aimed at my vast army of 38 blog readers, but no, I’m just a satisfied customer. Oh well.

In other news, expect a lot more bike graphs of local rides, now that I don’t have to fiddle with horrible software written by drunk interns at Garmin or National Geographic.