Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE frustrations continue
I want to love my HTC EVO 4G LTE, but its trying my patience. The screen is fantastic and I like a lot of the little integration touches HTC added in Sense for People, email, etc. But there are problems with the phone and its services that are driving me crazy.
Google Wallet isn’t working correctly, which Google has acknowledged and is working on, but I want it to work now. It was working fine on my first EVO 4G LTE but then I replaced it with a new one and now it won’t provision the Google pre-pay card or validate my Citi card at all. A lot of places here in Chicago actually have PayPass and I was using Wallet just about every day on my Galaxy Nexus.
Another problem is the SD card randomly becomes unavailable. Suddenly I’ll have no pictures available in my Gallery. I have to physically take out the card and re-insert it for it to be recognized again (even a full power off and reboot won’t recognize the SD card again until its removed). This is problematic in that there’s no indication if the card is available or not, so if for whatever reason it isn’t available and you start taking pictures with the camera, they’re going to be on the phone storage and not the SD card storage (if that’s what you’ve selected).
Then there’s the uploading pictures to Facebook. The 4G LTE 4G is touted as one of the best camera smartphones - it has a dedicated chip just for the camera. Most people who take pictures with their smartphone want to then upload those to Facebook, and the EVO should excel at this - is should be a “core competency” for this device.
Instead it’s painful. If you try and upload pictures via “Facebook for HTC Sense” usually what happens is the upload will show as “waiting” up in the notifications icons. The only way I’ve been able to successfully upload pictures via Sense is to actually pull down the notification tray and keep it open and watch the file upload. That’s insane. Sometimes even when doing that I see the file get to 20% or 50% and then it starts over again.
Using the “regular” Facebook uploader isn’t much better. While it does seem to upload most of the time, it often double posts photos, and will almost always put two notifications up for a single picture upload. One completes, the other stays there forever (or at least until you kill Facebook or power down the phone).
Example of what happens when I try to upload a single picture to Facebook
All these issues have happened exactly the same way on both EVO 4G LTE’s I’ve had, so this is a systemic software issue. How does a phone like this ship with such major problems uploading pictures to the largest, most popular social network in the world?
I hope HTC is working on an update for this phone soon; between customs delaying shipments, crazy bugs like the weather wallpaper keeping the camera from launching, and problems posting pictures, the EVO’s luster fades every day. Sprint can’t be happy about this either - this is supposed to be a halo flagship device for them.
I’m about ready to go back to my Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile and put the EVO in a drawer until Sprint lights up the LTE network and HTC pushes some updates out.
