Thoughts about the Galaxy SIII in comparison to the HTC Evo 4G

The short...
The Samsung SIII is three years newer, faster, but doesn't include many NEW features that you'd use every day, unless you want to try the S Voice and sharing things with other people who also have an SIII that are nearby. The SIII has a few gesture options which may or may not be super practical, like an option to automatically call someone when you look at their contact info and then raise the phone to your ear kind of stuff. I find that more accidental things occur with this kind of stuff right now. In the future, maybe the kinks will be worked out.  Although the Evo does not have a screen shot option, the SIII has two, sliding your hand from one side of the screen to the other or pressing the power and middle center button at the same time (at least with the 2013 February/March update). But it starts up faster, has better battery life, applications open faster, the speaker is louder, and the touch screen is generally more reliable in that it doesn't freeze up as often.

The Samsung keyboard doesn't automatically autocorrect misspellings though like the HTC does. I recommend the free 'Go Keyboard' and to play with the settings until you get it the way you like it if you use the Samsung. I hated all the typos I had with the Samsung stock keyboard more than minor qualms with the HTC and Go Keyboards.

The Evo runs on 4G WiMax, which is good in the short term if your city doesn't have 4G LTE, like St. Louis, though WiMax is "old" and the new towers being put into the Sprint network are most likely only going to be LTE. So future you may want the LTE, but you can always sell your phone and buy a different one on eBay.

The HTC Ego 4G's screen would freeze during use, and sometimes when trying to answer the phone. Sometimes the phone would not recognize touch tones, so like when I have to "Press 1" to answer a call on Google Voice, it was hit or miss. This happens less frequently with Samsung SIII.

Speed: The HTC Evo 4G is three years older has a 1 GHz processor vs the Samsung Galaxy SIII has a dual core 1.5 GHz processor in the US (Europe has an even faster quad core processor).

The Evo 4G is stuck on an old version of Android. Not a huge deal, because I haven't been majorly impressed by any of the updates. I would just find apps to let me do what some of the updates did, like juice plotter would tell me info about my battery use and consumption rates, a feature that was incorporated into the newer Android versions, but not as well as Juice Pltter does, at least in my opinion. Juice Pltter also lets you know how long something will take to chrage. I does give you a battery life estimate, but I find it to often be off looking at the battery usage graph with hours and minutes and battery percentages is very useful to me.



The difference between 4g WiMax and the new 4G LTE

4G anything means it is faster than 3G. The 4G speeds are fast enough for you to video chat, and are very welcome if your 3G connection is too slow to use at that minute, which can happen. On 4G WiMax, there is a widget toggle you can use to choose when to turn on your 4G on your phone to try and look for a network. When the 4G is used, it drains your battery pretty quickly. On 4G LTE, there was a setting, at least on my Samsung Galaxy SIII, where I had to change the networks it looks for by settings-More Settings-Mobile Network from the default of 'CDMA' to 'LTE / CDMA'. This will allow the phone to automatically connect to an LTE network if it senses one. There is no manual switch to look for a 4G network like onteh WiMax Evo 4G.

The HTC Evo was great for its time because it was the first Android smartphone to include 4G speeds. Sprint used WiMax 4G for this phone when it was released in 2010. Sprint, leaving their WiMax towers up, at least for now, but are now focusing on setting up LTE 4G towers, the next generation of 4G which uses a lower frequency band acquired by Sprint in the Nextel merger so in theory the 4G signal can penetrate more walls and provide better coverage. That is at least what the guy at the Sprint store told me.

Both phones can connect to the same 3G network. Currently, some areas only get 3G speeds, which vary from too slow to use to occasionally good enough to video chat. Using the speedtest.net app, I have gotten download speeds between .056 Mbps and one or two times as fast as 3.16 Mbps, but generally the 3G speeds are about .75 MBps in my experience in the Chicago and St. Louis areas, which is slow, at least compared to your home connection of DSL or cable which clock in around 3MBpsto 20Mbps, but generally usable for mobile sites which take less time to load than full sites, but iffy for video chat.

The 4G on the LTE network is supposed to be several times faster than the old WiMax 4G. Speed degrades as you get further away from the towers. At my apartment in Chicago, both clock in at about the same 3 Mbps, which is as fast a basic cable Internet connection. When I walk down the street about 5 blocks, I was able to get 20 Mbps standing outside a coffee shop which is insanely fast and rivals the 4G speeds from Verizon. However, when I was on a bus in the same area, the 4G signal would cut in and out every 30 seconds or so.


While traveling, though I can't remember what city, I did get a 4G WiMax to get around 20 Mbps on the Evo 4G. Only happened once though.