First Tech Problems

I recieved my “official” HTC Desktop Cradle for the EVO 3D today which I pre-ordered from HTCpedia (great price on spare EVO 3D batteries there, btw). I have to say this gorgeous gloss-black dock (the stock photo above really doesn’t do it justice!) exceeds my expectations in every way.

The dock ($44.99) comes with a standard HTC USB-microUSB charger/cable which helps explain the price. The build quality of the dock is solid, has a nice weight to it and rubber feet so it won’t slide around your desk. There’s a “Video” button (that’s what that circle is in the picture) and the microUSB port and that’s it. 

The first think I noticed was how easily the EVO 3D connects to the cradle; it just drops in with almost no force. It’s a perfect fit, as you would expect being designed by the phone’s manufacturer, and from the front you can see almost the entire phone, like it’s sitting on top of the dock surface rather than being in some deep groove/channel. 

The big surprise was once I dropped the phone in the dock it immediately switched to a landscape desktop. I had half expected the phone to switch to the car dock mode since that’s what it does when I put it in my Grip windshield car mount, but apparently the phone knows the difference between the two docks. I hadn’t even noticed there was a “dock app” in the 3D’s app drawer until now (you can play with it without having the dock to see what it looks like). 

The dock mode looks great, running continuously the HTC live weather animation as a background and displaying a mini Flip Clock, temperature and your next calendar appointment on the top right-hand side. The weather animation doesn’t stop like it does when used as a live wallpaper.

At the bottom of the screen are icons for Photo Frame, Connected Media, and Calendar. I haven’t found a way to change or add more programs so these seem to be fixed. There are also buttons to exit dock mode and dim the screen in the bottom left and right hand corners respectively. 

Photo Frame is what you expect, a slide show of the images on your phone with some motion to it. If you tap the screen (not the menu button) you get a control bar that lets you return to the dock, skip forward or backward, pause the slide show, or enter settings. Settings lets you turn on/off repeat, shuffle, music, control the orientation, select transitions (slide, rotate, pan and zoom, random), set the playback speed, and specify which folders you want pictures displayed from. The only change I made to the default setttings was to turn random on; the pan and zoom transition is great.

If you click Connected Media you can select from Music, Photos or Videos that you can send to a “nearby player”. I’m using this at work in my office, so I can’t really test this functionality, but I assume its the DLNA “projection” you get in the Gallery app. The Calendar icon pulls up the standard HTC Calendar application.

Pressing the Menu button while in dock mode lets you access the dock mode settings. Here you can turn on/off Auto-launch (on by default), Auto-connect which lets you connect to a selected bluetooth device when docked, select the default BT device, Auto-resume (“If user doesn’t operate the device, auto launch the most recently used app), Friend Stream updates, Portable Wi-Fi hotspot, and select how long before the screen is automatically dimmed (1, 10, 30 min, 1, 4, 8 hours, or Never). If the USB cable is connected to a computer you can specify the default connection type (or “ask me”). 

If Friend Stream is on you’ll see a single Twitter or Facebook status cycling below the weather information on the dock screen. It really doesn’t show you much other than the picture and name of who just posted, so I turned it off (I have Trillian already bombarding me with updates on my desktop monitor already). 

There are no instructions included with the dock, so I’m making some assumptions about that round Video button on that’s on the backside of the dock. The box has a bullet that states “Supports the inline connection of AC M490 MHL HDMI adaptor, so my guess is if you have that adapter and a cable hooking this up to an HDMI display it would change modes for you, which might be handy for some people who buy Watch videos. Without that adapter connected, pressing the Video button just drops me out of dock mode and to the  standard main home screen. Pressing it again will toggle me back into dock mode. This actually is handy since in dock mode the 3D’s home button is deactivated.

So there you have it. I originally bought this strictly as a charger base to replace my EVO 4G’s Seidio dock. I really like the functionality of the dock application although I wish there was a way to add a few more widgets to it (if someone figures that out please let me know!) and it looks great sitting on my desk. For me this was definitely worth the money.

Ever since I saw the first pictures of the EVO 3D and that machined aluminum shutter button I’ve been excited about this phone as a camera. I’m a huge Facebook poster and love uploading pictures on the fly. The EVO 4G’s camera was good, but I’m not a fan of on-screen shutter buttons. And then the Sensation was announced with all its cool camera features like HDR and burst mode shooting. Since the Sensation is a Sense 3.0 phone, I made an assumption that the EVO 3D, another Sense 3.0 phone, would have the same features.

You know what they say about assumption: It makes an ass out of you and umption. (If you haven’t seen The Long Kiss Goodnight go rent it. Now.)

It turns out not all Sense 3.0 phones get the same software; instead it seems HTC camera software is tied to the camera sensor. The Sensation (and upcoming myTouch4G Slide) have HTC’s 8 MP sensor, where as the EVO 3D has two of HTC’s 5 MP sensors, like the one used on the Desire. 

The EVO 3D’s camera software is very similar to that on a few Desire ROMs I played with on my EVO 4G. That isn’t terrible; the 5 MP camera software has a lot of enhancement and UI features over the original EVO 4G’s software, but its not nearly as feature rich as the functionality on the Sensation. No burst mode, no HDR, no Scenes, etc.

On top of that the EVO 3D is missing the 4G’s ISO 1250 setting, it only goes up to 800. Again I think this is related to the 3D’s sensor, maybe the 5 MP sensor can’t handle that ISO, but its a big loss for me as I take a lot of my phone photos at night (read: low-lit bars and clubs), and that ISO 1250 setting was a godsend for getting the 4G to quickly focus in low light. The 3D’s 800 setting works OK, but its still hard to see your subjects on the screen compared to the 4G using 1250.

Tip: If you haven’t picked up on this already, manually adjust your ISO to 800 when shooting pictures in low-lit situations; the “auto” setting is pretty worthless. It’s easy to remember: if you can’t see your subject(s) in on the screen, its just dark, jack the ISO up to 800 so you can.

Focusing the 3D’s camera is another bizarre issue. The reason I was excited to get the physical two-stage shutter button was because I thought it would solve my problems with focus composition. Touch to focus worked well enough on the 4G but if you’re used to point & shoot camera’s all you really want to do is push the shutter button half way down to set your focus, hold it there to keep the focus locked and then reframe the shot however you like, then press the rest of the way down to get the picture.

Out of the box that is not what you get with the EVO 3D, even though it has that great physical two-stage button. What happens instead is you press half way down, get your focus, but the second you move the 3D it starts automatically refocusing your shot (usually in the center of whatever the phone is pointed at unless you have face detection turned on). Even if you have focus lock and don’t move, when you press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture it refocuses again! 

Tip: if you want to use the physical shutter button like a “real” camera, turn OFF Auto Focus. This will let you use the center focus spot with the shutter button detent as you would expect.

Right now I have left Face Detection on, as the 3D seems to avoid red-eye with the flash when it finds faces in the frame. When I see that the camera is focusing on the faces I just press the shutter button down in one motion, otherwise it will lose the face focus and switch the the center spot if you stop at the detent.

Other issues with the camera: 

- Sometimes there is huge shutter lag; I think it has to do with the flash cycling up but I need to do more experimentation, it doesn’t seem consistent.

- Sometimes the camera just completely locks up. It takes the picture but freezes in the preview. You can exit to the home screen or notifications, but if you try and go back into the camera app its still frozen at the picture preview. The only way I’ve found to clear it is to go to the task manager and kill the camera app.

- Focus lock doesn’t lock the exposure - if you reframe the shot the focus will stay locked but the camera will now re-adjust the exposure to the center spot. This is frustrating when your working with sunsets or building silhouettes and are trying to quickly adjust the exposure. The only way around it is to use the exposure controls found under the Image Adjustments menu item.

- Auto Enhance is a bit of a mystery; it’s on by default but I examined a few pictures and their file sizes and found that this feature is compressing the files about 60% of what they would be with Auto Enhance off. In comparing the images there was less detail in the “Auto Enhance” version of the same shot when zooming in. A typical file size on the EVO 3D with Auto Enhance off is around 800K; turn it on, and the same shot yields a file size around 250K - that’s a lot of compression. I have a 32 GB microSD card in my EVO 3D so space isn’t an issue for me, so Auto Enhance is staying off. 

A couple of other missing features from the 4G are:

- No Quality setting (4G had High, Fine and Normal)

- No metering mode settings (4G had Spot, Center area, Average)

OK so that’s the negative side. On the plus side, there are some things that are upgrades over the camera in the 4G:

Some functions that were buried in the 4G’s settings menu are now right on the screen for quick one-touch access, including being able to switch between the front and rear cameras, switching between still and video recording modes, and access to the Effects settings. The 3D effects are Distortion, Vignette, Depth of Field, Dots, Vintage, Vintage Warm, Vintage Cold, Grayscale, Sepia, Negative, Solarize, Posterize, and Aqua, along with little previews of what each affect does. The 4G only has 6 effects and there was no preview image. The “zoom” bar is also always on the screen, you don’t have to toggle it on/off like you did on the 4G.

Another welcome feature is the 3D’s camera has a wider field of view than the 4G - it’s not a lot but its noticeable. One thing to remember on both the EVO 3D and 4G is that the “widescreen” option actually crops the image to fit the phone’s screen. This may look nicer if black bars along the side of your picture bother you, but remember you’re not using the full camera sensor if you have the widescreen mode turned on (you can actually get more in your shot horizontally in the 4:3 mode, which is what I leave my EVO 3D’s camera set to by default).

A nice upgrade in the Gallery is that if you decide after taking the picture it would have looked cool as a Vintage shot, you can apply effects after the fact via the Edit Photo menu. 

The Gallery app itself now has a nice thumbnail view for albums and has some new slideshow features such as being able to playback pictures and videos on DLNA devices. 

One thing that was driving me crazy was when viewing a single picture it seemed like the Share and Delete options had disappeared - they weren’t on the menu that pops up when you hit the 3D’s menu button like they were on the 4G. Believe it or not it took me 3 days to figure out that a single tap on the image pulls up another menu bar that includes the edit photo, share, delete, go to thumbnails, and go to camera functions.

The Share functions are pretty much the same as on the 4G (depending on what apps you have loaded), but HTC has enhanced the Facebook uploader to allow you to tag people in your photos prior to uploading them, a really nice feature. 

Another change is how you view your Facebook, Flickr or Picasa web albums in the Gallery. There used to be icons at the bottom and you slid your finger along them to switch gallery views. Now you tap the “Albums” header at the top of the screen and you get a list of web albums, as well as media servers you can connect to (I haven’t been able to get a video to stream from my media server yet). Changing albums is very similar to how you change email accounts in the HTC email client, but if you’re used to the EVO 4G it still may take you a beat to find it.

I’ve hit on a lot of usability features here mainly because they affect the quality of the picture I can take and how easy it is to share it. If I can’t get the camera to focus quickly or get the exposure right then what’s the point? 

So what do I think of the pictures I’ve taken so far? I think I took consistently better pictures with my EVO 4G, and that’s disappointing. Some of its been a learning curve of how to setup the phone to work the way I want with the shutter button, but even then the pictures are affected by poor white balance and over-exposure when using the flash. Granted these are phone cameras and the issues aren’t enough to make me quit using the EVO 3D and go back to the 4G, but its discouraging to see the quality decline rather than improve when “upgrading” to the latest and greatest. 

Everything I’ve commented on so far is in regards to using the EVO 3D’s camera in 2D mode; that’s the primary mode I use it in since my phone pictures are mainly to share with friends on Facebook or via SMS. As I’ve mentioned before the 3D images work, but they’re hard on the eyes and since they’re converted to 2D when you upload them they’re really just to show people the effect “right then and there”. It’s a fun option but I’d rather see HTC focus on creating a better 2D experiance (which it looks like they may finally be doing with the Sensation and myTouch 4G Slide). Some may say my expectations were wrong since I bought a 3D phone instead of something like the Sensation (not available on Sprint, btw), but my take is the 3D function should have been an “extra”, and not compromised the 2D capabilities.

All that said, I’m learning to live with it and my pictures are getting better, and for everything else I use my phone for the EVO 3D exceeds the 4G in every way (except maybe the speakerphone, that could be a lot louder, but that’s what bluetooth is for). 

So I’m about a month in now with the EVO 3D and overall I’m pretty happy with it. Like most evolutionary upgrades I’m not as “WOW!” over it like I was when I got my EVO 4G last year (which was my first Android phone and first 4G device), but I’m enjoying the bump in processing horsepower and the qHD screen is simply gorgeous. The 3D is fun and while the novelty wore off quickly for me (mainly due to no new 3D movies in Watch, what’s up with that HTC?!), everyone I show it to is simply blown away by the effect (so much so it always takes me a little by surprise). 

That said, I have issues with the camera in 2D mode (more on that coming in a separate post) and there are a couple of little bugs that need to be squashed:

1. 3D mode turning on for 3D video playback: The phone has an issue where after a day or so it won’t recognize 3D content correctly and plays it back in 2D. The 2D picture is actually great, but for that particular content I’m playing it for the 3D effect. This happens with both the Green Hornet movie via Watch and when playing back YouTube 3D content such as the GoPro Hero 3D highlight reel. It’s pretty annoying when you go to show someone a 3D video and they look at you like, “eh, it looks good, but not really 3D” and then I have to say “oh wait, let me reboot my phone, sorry about that.” Because that’s what it takes to get it working again, a full reboot of the phone. The camera doesn’t seem to be affected by this; even if videos aren’t playing back correctly, the camera will honor the 2D-3D switch and work properly. HTC: Please fix ASAP.

2. For some reason, neither the Facebook app or the DirecTV app will retain their icon on the home screen after a reboot. (I’m rebooting a lot thanks to the 3D bug). All the other program icons on the home screens stay fine (and I have a lot of them on my 7 screens) but those two apps won’t “stick”. I’ve removed them and then re-added them and they look OK, but then if I reboot again I get the generic “android” icon. They still load fine so the shortcut itself still functions. I can’t figure out why the icons keep resetting.

Thoughts on the camera and gallery (along with a few tips) coming next!

Loaded Doggcatcher this morning and my usual feeds (Android Central, iPad Live, The Talk Show, Radio KAL) and then paired the phone to my Jawbone ERA for my 20 minute walk to work. I’m happy to report the Bluetooth signal seems to be as strong or stronger than the EVO 4G; I had no dropouts as I listened to Mobile Nations with the phone in my pants front pocket. With the EVO 4G if I turned my head so the “line of sight” between the phone and the ERA was blocked by my shoulder I would often lose the audio until I turned my head again; try as I might today I couldn’t get the signal to drop using the EVO 3D. We’ll see how the walk home fares, for some reason in the evening there’s more interference.

Also the Presto beta installed fine and worked perfectly in Doggcatcher (I listen to most podcasts at 1.4x or 1.5x).

I really like the new visual style of the HTC Calendar app, it takes advantage of the QHD resolution by adding a calendar view mode bar at the bottom (so you can jump from day to month views without hitting the menu first) and displays the current weather at the top of the day view. The new snooze/dismiss appointment alarm function on the lock screen is great too, you just drag the snooze or dismiss icon into the lock circle. 

I still can’t get over the display - it is stunning. Its surprising how just adding 160 pixels in height can make such a difference in things like the calendar and email apps. Pixel density is also improved since the screen is a little narrower, but that also means that the fonts are little smaller than the EVO 4G (I think on a 4” or smaller display the 960 x 540 resolution would be too hard on my 47-year-old eyes).

The phone still feels blindingly fast - I wonder how soon that will wear off? I think longer than the iPad 2 did vs. the original iPad :) Beyond just flipping between screens, the place I’ve noticed the speed increase the most is in the web browser, page rendering is just lightning fast compared to the EVO 4G.

So far I pretty much love everything about Sense 3.0, the only thing missing for me so far is I wish Quick Settings in the notification pull-down had a “mute” switch. I also find the new “page scrolling” in the app tray a little odd; I guess I’m used to the free-scrolling from the 4G’s Sense and other ROMs. Would be nice if you could toggle that on or off (if its there I haven’t found it yet).

Battery life is decent so far; I’m at 50% after 7h 42m with my normal workload of push Exchange email and phone calls. The display is 60% of the usage, calls 12%, Wi-Fi 8%. I’m deliberately letting the battery run down to 20% for the first few days before throwing it on the charger to see what the battery life is like and to try and cycle the it a little (normally I just plugged the EVO 4G into its charging cradle whenever I’m at my desk). Note that I haven’t turned the WiMAX radio on yet.

Two intermittent issues so far: first was the “reboot” command from the Power menu wasn’t working. Tried it 3 different times over the last day and every time it powered off the phone completely, even though it gave a confirmation screen it was going to restart. This afternoon I used the reboot command (to fix the next issue) and it worked fine, go figure.

The second issue was I went to demo the Green Hornet movie to a colleague to show off the 3D screen and it played back in 2D. There are no options in the HTC Watch player to toggle 2D/3D (which would be nice, if you wanted to watch the a movie in high-res instead of 3D), the 2D/3D slider had no effect, and killing the app and restarting it didn’t fix it either. The camera was working in 3D mode but going back to Watch it still wouldn’t play in 3D. The fix was to reboot the phone (fast reboot is another nice feature on the EVO 3D!).

Other than those minor hiccups everything is running like clockwork. Still have lots of apps to install/configure to get things back the way they were on the EVO 4G.

OK I know why all the early reviews complained about the 3D screen: I took a couple of photos with the camera in 3D mode and they’re almost impossible to view. Unlike the Green Hornet movie or the 3D Spiderman game, there is an exact, precise “sweet spot” for viewing images taken with the EVO’s 3D lenses and its damn near impossible to find. Even when you do it takes some concentration to get the effect to work. The Nintendo 3DS camera has horribly low resolution but at least you can easily make out the 3D effect.

The funny thing is even the sample 3D photos supplied on the EVO’s microSD card are just as bad. The one of the dog and another of some water coming out of storm pipes are relatively easy to see, but the rest are just as difficult to view as the shots I took. The separation of the two different viewpoints is extreme so any minor movement of the phone will cause ghosting or a double image to appear.

Based on this my 2D-3D slider will be pretty much fixed in the 2D position. Honestly I expected that anyway, since I shoot a lot of candid snapshots that I upload to Facebook and the 3D mode isn’t going to do anything for those anyway. Still its strange and disappointing how night and day the 3D results are. If I’d been in an HTC/Sprint focus group I would have said “keep the 3D screen, but ditch the 3D camera”.

OK finally back from Las Vegas and picked up my EVO 3D which was waiting for me at the office. I’m still in the midst of setting up all my accounts but I couldn’t resist taking a peek at the pre-installed Green Hornet 3D movie. I have to say I’m shocked how good it looks, given a lot of the negative press I’ve read over the last week.

I have a Nintendo 3DS and I think the 3D effect on it is pretty good, but I’m constantly fidgeting with the screen, moving it back n’ forth, playing with the 3D depth slider trying to find that “sweet spot” viewing angle. If I don’t have the 3DS just right I see “ghosting” double images and sometimes it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the effect.

So I was fully expecting to have to start moving the EVO 3D around once the movie started, but instead it “just worked”. The second the Columbia Pictures logo came up the picture was in perfect 3D to my eyes (well, as perfect as 3D is with this technology). And regardless if I move the EVO 3D away from or closer to my eyes the effect stayed the same. I think tilted it a little from side to side and hardly noticed any change in the picture. This is really surprising, since any slight movement with the 3DS destroys the 3D illusion until you get it back in the sweet spot.

In short the 3D effect on the EVO 3D when watching this movie is spectacular in my mind. However I will say you do notice the resolution hit from 3D much more on the EVO’s larger screen than compared to the 3DS, and the picture looks more like those lenticular holograms on DVD box covers (i.e. Batman Begins), kind of like you’re looking through a fine vertical mesh, but that’s a small compromise for glasses-free 3D on a portable device.

My guess is pre-rendered 3D content like this is going to look very good on the EVO 3D, and its the content created with the EVO itself that is underwhelming people (lets face it, Cameron didn’t film Avatar using tiny 5MP sensors). I’m anxious to get more content like Green Hornet (unfortunately not one of my favorite movies, but does serve its “demo reel” purpose just fine) and see if the results are consistent. 

Anyway a lot more to come on the EVO 3D as I start using it full-time starting today, but just had to post how impressed I am with the 3D display rendering the movie. What a fun toy this is going to be!