The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

Let’s get the two most talked about items, battery life & 4G via WiMAX, out of the way first.

Battery Life

The first data on battery life I saw was positive (“We know what you’re thinking, though: what about battery life? Amazingly, …”) in the May 19 Engadget review. However, the same day, Walt Mossberg was reporting Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags. That day, still a couple of weeks from my own hands on experience, I accepted those as different experiences due to different usage and expectations.

Nothing since has made me think much differently. I was concerned about battery life, so I ordered a cheap second battery. While waiting for the off-brand battery, I tried to see how long the battery would go with minimal usage, just my normal phone usage. I was able to get three days out of a single charge. That’s not much worse than I was used to with my pocket phone (LG Muziq), so I started thinking that I would be OK with battery life.

After the extra battery came, I fully charged the original battery, set it aside to be my spare, and have used the off-brand battery ever since. With my normal usage habits, including powering down the phone when I’m sleeping, I usally go two days between charges. Only once, after a long day of heavy phone usage, camera usage and my grand-daughter’s game playing, has the phone asked to be recharged, after 13 hours use that day.

The most comprehensive review I’ve seen are the 13 pages from AnandTech on June 28. The page discussing battery life leads off “There’s no other way to put it: the EVO 4G has terrible battery life.” The data there doesn’t contradict my experience. But that reviewer wants perfection — the last sentence says “While I’d be willing to carry something the size of the EVO, I’d need it to be perfect in order to make that tradeoff.”  I’m not expecting perfection. With hardware in general, and certainly “phones” like these, one can always wait for something cheaper/faster/better. I don’t see anything currently available that would be better for me than the Evo. Droid X, though a littler newer, doesn’t seem any better. I ponder about the iPhone 4, but only ponder.

4G via WiMAX

Click on the top map above and you’ll see the coverage at my home, light green to indicate some WiMAX signal, but not the dark green to indicate strong signal, with big patches of white (no signal) nearby.  The other map is a broader picture of our part of town, mostly dark green, but noticeable patches of white and light green.

Though I can use and appreciate the WiMAX in some places, it is mostly artificial, in that I mostly would either not use my pocket computer in those places, or would choose WiFi over WiMAX in the places where I would use the Evo. Most of the places where I’ve really wanted to use WiMAX, the signal just hasn’t been strong enough.

Sometimes it seems the Evo is trying to use WiMAX when it should accept that the WiMAX signal is too weak and revert to 3G. To avoid that apparent phenomenon, I usually leave the WiMAX turned off, turning it on every few days when it seems like it might really be useful. Then I wonder why Sprint is charging me the extra $10/month for 4G, but rather than protest I hope for the day when the coverage here is comprehensive.

All the “little” things

To me some of these are a much bigger deal than battery and WiMAX concerns. They make Evo a good pocket computer for me.

Display

Both the size, 4.3″ diagonal and resolution, 217 pixels/inch, are a delight to me. I can’t imagine anything physically larger that would still be a pocket computer, until flexible displays become practical, if they do. I’m typing this report on a screen with 99 pixels/inch. Looking at photos and videos is so much more pleasant with the Evo’s higher resolution. The difference is dramatic enough to make me curious about the iPhone 4 “Retina” display, at 326 pixels/inch, but not curious enough to go looking for one.

“Keyboard”

I didn’t know what to think before I tried the on-screen keyboard. I didn’t think I’d miss having tiny physical keys and knew that a pocket computer couldn’t have big enough keyboard for touch typing. I’d gotten used to the on-screen keyboard of my i300 easily enough, without learning Graffiti, so I thought I’d be OK but clumsy without a stylus. Learning to use the keyboard, with just my fingers, has been faster than I expected, though I’ll usually rotate the Evo for landscape keyboard unless what I’m entering is very short.

Google integration, Android, HTC Sense

With Evo’s Android, I expect good fit with Google, and that has been true as far as I’ve explored. Besides search, I mostly use Google for Reader, and Reader works OK in mobile mode for skimming tens of headlines (actually groups of 15) at a time. I don’t use Gmail much, but will probably use Gmail a little more as time goes on and I become more dependent on the Evo. Having Google Maps in my pocket has been useful a few times. But I really haven’t explored Android or HTC Sense very much so far. That is an endorsement from my perspective — as an end user I haven’t had the need to explore the software much. Eventually I will, but because I want to, not because I need to.

Camera(s)

“Faster/better/cheaper” applies to cameras, in particular, cameras built-in to computers and phones. The Evo’s built-in cameras suffice for almost all my purposes. The still photos are about as good as the pocket camera I bought last year, with lack of optical zoom being the main limitation. For video, the Evo is definitely preferable to my “marvelous toy” (AIPTEK MPVR+) of three years ago. Optical zoom and 1080p are the main reasons I think of separate cameras now.

YouTube (Flash)

Browsing Android phones at a Sprint store earlier this year, I was dismayed about the absence/clumsiness of YouTube support. So I was expecting to have to deal with that when I got my Evo. But YouTube HQ was already in place, and works just fine. Other Flash video doesn’t work, but I don’t have much need for other Flash video, and will probably just wait for the Evo to have Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1.

Apps

My daughter was dismayed that I’d had the Evo for more than 24 hours and still hadn’t downloaded any apps. I don’t think she was impressed that I responded by getting ConnectBot (SSH client) and AndroidVNC (a.k.a. Android VNC Viewer). I hadn’t tried SSH or VNC on a phone since the i300. They both seem to work just fine. I’ve even tried using vi after logging in to a Fedora machine with ConnectBot, knowing that the on-screen keyboard would make it very hard to use vi normally. That I was able to use vi at all seemed worth celebrating. ConnectBot is mostly for SSH tunneling, at least in my current thinking, and handles that well to the extent I’ve tried it with VNC, IMAP and SMTP.

I’m still behind the curve in downloading apps. Since I haven’t explored many of the factory installed apps, and what I’ve explored has met my needs, I’m not likely to be much of an app consumer. I did download “Barbie in a Mermaid tale” for our grand-daughter — she and our daughter like to play that.

Mail

Ever since I’ve been handling mail servers for myself and others, I’ve been a fan of IMAP for mail servers. I’ve been less of a fan of most mail clients’ handling of IMAP. The only two clients I’ve ever really liked with IMAP, particularly with regard to handling of folders, are Netscape Mail and the Outlook Express lineage of Microsoft options, including the current form, Windows Live Mail. I’m pleasantly surprised by the handling of IMAP folders by the Evo mail client.

Multitouch

Reading about the lack of multi-touch in Android had been one source of trepidation, unnecessary trepidation in my Evo experience. Multi-touch may not be present in all of the apps, or as fully featured as in other environments, but seems OK in the browser and the PDF viewer. AndroidVNC doesn’t seem to have adopted multi-touch yet, presumably because the APIs are relatively new to Android, but does have discrete zoom buttons.

More to come

Froyo

Before I got the Evo, I thought I’d be impatiently waiting for HTC to update from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo), if for no other reason than to have Flash support. Since the Evo YouTube HQ support seems just fine, I’m simply curious about 2.2, not impatient. Now is probably a good time to start taking a closer look at how Android and HTC/Sprint software all fit together on the Evo.

Travel

I’ve not gone on any trips with Evo yet. I’m expecting that having a pocket computer will make me much less likely to bring out a laptop in airports, etc. On the other hand, the Evo’s (extra $30/month, so far not purchased by me) portable Hotspot capability may be attractive in terms of both convenience and avoiding airport and hotel WiFi charges.

Videoconferencing

I haven’t tried Qik video chat — I don’t know anyone to call with Qik! I’d really like to try Skype on Evo, but my impression is that Skype won’t be offering video calling on Android/Evo any time soom. I keep seeing intriquing reports about fring, and it appears that a production release of fring for Android is available, so I’ll have to give fring a try.

Development

I’m assuming I’ll have to build an app of my own for Android/Evo, if for no other reason than to say “Hello World!”, but it will probably be a while before I do so.

But right now, I need to respond to all the text messages that are making my Evo beep at me…

The 450MHz Pentium II mail/web/name server had been seeming more sluggish, and the load average was often in the low single digits, not cause for alarm, but not the totally loafing I was used to seeing less than a year ago.

Every time I would investigate, thinking that web traffic might be the problem, especially MySQL for WordPress, I’d find multiple instances of spamd consuming the most processor and memory.

This was anything but rigorous analysis, but surprising/disappointing. After considering moving both mail and web to the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 sitting next to the 450MHz PII, instead I moved only the web service to the 3.0GHz P4, leaving the 450MHz machine to just handle mail. The web traffic, including MySQL, seems to place minimal load on the 3.0GHz processor, but the load average on the 450MHz processor still creeps up, as it fends off spam.

A few days ago I was passing by the neighborhood RadioShack and thought “Maybe I could get an Evo from RadioShack faster than directly from Sprint?”.  I walked in, asked a few questions, and a few minutes later I was pre-ordering an Evo, only my second “smartphone”, my first being a Samsung SPH-i300 purchased in late 2001.

I think the i300 was the 2^nd Palm OS (3.5.2) phone on the market (soon after a monochrome phone from Kyocera). I loaded it up with SSH, VNC, a PDF reader, Java ME, Java apps of my own devising and probably some less used apps I’ve forgotten. Using the i300 changed my thinking about email, about web browsing, and application development. But ultimately, the hardware and network weren’t up to what I wanted — I wanted much more screen area in both pixels and physical size, faster processing, and faster transfers.

By some time in 2006 I’d gotten to the point where the i300 sat in the charging cradle most of the time. Late last year I stopped using it entirely — I think it is in my office closet somewhere, along with a spare that a friend gave me. My current phone (an LG Muziq) will nominally browse the web, handle email (even IMAP), and play all the MP3s I put on a MicroSD card, but I rarely use it for more than voice calls, an occasional text message, and an occasional photo.

I couldn’t believe the iPhone, its predecessors and successors, could be all that fundamentally better than the i300. All the pre-3G and post-3G iPhone networking complaints, including the 2009 SXSW reports, didn’t help entice me. I didn’t even touch an iPhone for the longest time. I kept hoping for a larger scale device, bigger than a phone and smaller than a netbook, that I would find satisfying. My XO has not been that. The alluring iPad is too big and, so far, missing too much to convince me.

Since the HTC Evo was announced, it has seemed the closet fit I’m going to find anytime soon. Lots more pixels than the i300, modern processor, and, potentially satisfying networking. (WiMAX seems to cover our neighborhood and my most frequent travel spots.)

Having ordered the phone, now I can’t wait. Every new report or review, even Mossberg’s ambivalence (Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags), raises anticipation. In less than two weeks I should be immersed in Evo.

I spent Friday morning with the managers of the seven Red Arco Iris project regions (“networks”) and other Nicaraguan staff, working towards la red de redes (the network of networks). I believe, and I think the staff believes, that improved use of email, use of Internet shared storage (SkyDrive) and Skype calling will facilitate better communication and more efficient use of time and other resources.

One of the surprises of that session was eagerness to try Linux. I’m encouraging exploration using Ubuntu “live” CDs.

a.k.a. ”This looks great! But how do I use it?” (silence)

Back in the 90s, Larry Ellison and others were positing the feasibility of the “Internet Computer” a.k.a. “Network Computer”, based on “thin client” hardware and ubiquitous network access to servers and services. Though impractical then, computing along those lines is (becoming) practical today.

For those with sufficient  motivation, Google Documents (a.k.a. “Docs”) and (Microsoft) SkyDrive provide enticing capabilities.

One motivation is sharing files almost as if the people sharing the files are in the same location, using a conventional file server, even though the people are actually separated by significant distances. I’ve been exploring two scenarios, one city-wide and the other international.

Both Docs and SkyDrive operate along those lines but necessarily attempt to integrate with local “desktop” computing (quite possibly on a portable notebook or netbook) via a web browser. Both succeed and fail,  in different ways, with some of the failures likely by design intent.

For example, SkyDrive doesn’t reasonably permit in-place editing of a document, but rather expects documents to be uploaded/downloaded. Likely Microsoft is trying to protect sales of Office, but likely also waiting until support for in-place editing has been sufficiently well developed.

Less explicably, Docs limits file formats to three application surrogates for the Office core, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus non-editable PDFs. The in-place editing capabilities are likely more than enough for many users, but not seriously competitive with the full capabilities of the Office (or OpenOffice, etc.) applications.

Docs (though in seemingly perpetual “beta”, like GMail) has been around longer and seems easier to learn, mostly because it requires relatively little interaction with the traditional desktop environment, compared to SkyDrive. So in choosing whether to try to use Docs or SkyDrive one of the first questions is whether or not the limited file formats of Docs are sufficient. Also, though Docs may be easier to learn than SkyDrive, switching one’s thinking from desktop computing to Docs does require effort, and I’ve struggled to get others to expend that effort.

If those four Docs formats are not sufficient, then SkyDrive seems the best available option. The usage model is different from what most people are used to, and requires substantial interaction with the existing desktop environment, so SkyDrive is not easy to learn. But compared to the problems of carrying USB sticks from computer to computer and/or sending USB sticks in postal mail, there is much to motivate the learning.

Sometime this year, Google may provide another option, GDrive. For now, I’m encouraging people to give SkyDrive a try.

Some more related reading:

Watch out Google Docs – Microsoft SkyDrive is Coming

SkyDrive, Google Docs, Office Live Workspaces – Compared (suspense music…)

From SkyDrive to Google Docs

Yahoo drops its Briefcase

Cloud Storage’s Killer App… Geographic Collaboration

Much of my time is focused on helping the poorest of the poor in rural Nicaragua, where families subsist on US $1/day income. Red Arco Iris, as it is known in Nicaragua, a.k.a. Rainbow Network in the U.S., provides feeding centers, micro-loans, housing assistance, schools and educational assistance, and physicians and dentists at community clinics.

Of course, computer technology, Internet communication, cell phones, fax machines and other standard office accoutrements enable and facilitate Red Arco Iris staff in the seven regional offices. The staff enablement may be felt indirectly in the communities, but we can be much more ambitious.

Our ”feet on the ground” efforts have little to do with modern technology: food at the feeding centers is prepared on open fires, micro-loan committees depend on hand-written communication, the houses we help build are concrete/cinder-block/tin-roof construction, classes may be held under a shade tree, doctors practice in makeshift clinics, and so forth.

However, modern technology “inevitably” finds its way into direct import in these rural communities, whether it be a television hooked up to hazardous power or a cell phone passed amongst the people. Portable computers are beginning to be present. Internet connections are plausible. 20-year-olds who ten years ago couldn’t attend school are now graduating from high school and going on to college, where the technology needs and wants are not hard to imagine.

Assuming technology incursions are inevitable, are on the cusp of meaningfulness in rural Nicaragua, the questions become “How can technology be positive in these communities?” (money going to the cell phone providers is positive!?) and “How can we facilitate positive technology infusion?”.

Lots of small steps are being made. In days to come, there will be more to say about those steps.

Preparing for my trip to Managua last week, I wondered what cell phone, Internet access and TV would be like at the hotel in Managua. Even more I wondered about the rural Nicaraguan areas, where I soon learned that sometimes the creek beds look better for driving than the roads.

I knew a couple of things in advance. (1) My CDMA cell phone from Sprint would likely be useless, since presumably all of the cell coverage would be GSM. (2) The hotel said they had WiFi throughout the property. Both of those were verified when I got to my room.

When I turned on my notebook, I had no trouble browsing, but my email wouldn’t work. Also, ssh wouldn’t work. It didn’t take long to figure out that the hotel was blocking most outgoing ports, apparently allowing only outgoing HTTP (80), HTTPS (443), POP3 (110) and SMTP (25). I normally use IMAP for mail, so I was temporarily stuck using Squirrelmail, but I figured I could get along OK with just 80 and 443. Probably not a lot different than a lot of office workers experience in larger businesses in the U.S.

I had planned on using Skype to call home. After sluggishness starting up, presumably figuring out how to tunnel through 80 or 443, Skype seemed to work just fine for audio and video calls. This was my first serious usage of Skype. The worst problem was with the echo cancellation at my wife’s end. The 2.8MHz P4 she was using wasn’t up to having the microphone so close to the speakers.

When later I went to the airport, literally across the street, to meet some traveling companions, I took my notebook and accessed the free WiFi there. They weren’t blocking ports, so I was able to ssh to a machine at home, tell Apache not to listen on 443, tell sshd that it needed to listen on 443, and the port blockage problems were resolved. Back in the hotel room I told PuTTY to login to 443, tunnel the ports I needed, and I was back in business with IMAP, etc.

TV in the hotel was very modern, about 100 channels, about 1/3 English and 2/3 Spanish. (My Spanish comprehension leaves a lot to be desired.) Most of the commercial U.S. networks were represented, with ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC coming from the NYC affiliates. PBS was all I really missed.

I didn’t try to use phones/Internet or TV in rural areas, but they were more accessible to the Nicaraguans than paved roads. Our Nicaraguan host used his cell almost everywhere we went. Even in the poorest homes there was often a TV set — I don’t know what channels they get. In some of the rural offices there was DSL. In one there was a Vonage phone with a Springfield, Missouri number. No more prohibitive long distance charges back to the States!

Part of why video conferencing got sidetracked in the 1990s were the wasted, ultimately counter-productive, efforts associated with ITU-T Recommendation T.120, “Data protocols for multimedia conferencing”, an ambitious family of specifications, once seemingly essential to the industry, and now disdained.

I can both confess and disclaim roles in these efforts. It was important to integrate personal computers with (video) conferencing. However, data conferencing was not as important as many of us thought back then. There were and are lots of ways to have two-way data conferencing. Extending one or more of those to an asymmetrical multi-point paradigm would likely have met the real needs and survived. However, T.120 attempted much more, complex symmetrical multipoint data conferencing with many participants.

The primary requirement was and is for conference participants to view something a speaker wants to be seen. In physical conferences, this “something” is typically two dimensional, and might be letter sized paper, a marker board (“white” board), a flip-chart on an easel, a projection screen or a computer display. Though this “something” may be modified during the conference, and though more than one person may make modifications, the typical situation is that either there are no modifications or that the speaker is the only one making changes.

The seeming emphasis in the T.120 family of recommendations was in T.126, “Still Image Protocol Specification”. T.126, supported by the prerequisites in T.122-T.125, elaborately defines layers of two dimensional planes, a designated virtual pointer plane and multi-party annotation of the images. These capabilities are more than are needed in most situations, and more than most implementors want to provide.

T.120 was also over-reaching in defining file transfer protocols (T.127, “Multipoint Binary File Transfer Protocol Specification”), and program sharing implementation (T.128, “Multipoint application sharing”).

In 1993-96, when T.120 emerged as a seeming necessity, there were many networking options, including ISDN, analog telephone lines, TCP/IP, IPX/SPX and others, all addressed by T.120, particularly T.123, “Protocol Stack for Audiographics and Audiovisual Teleconference Applications”.

There have been very few T.120 implementations, probably no successful implementations except for the one from DataBeam. DataBeam’s implemenation was licensed by most companies that supported T.120, including Microsoft. Microsoft NetMeeting was the most prominent application supporting T.120, and often used in other conferencing products simply to profide T.120.

Microsoft abandoned NetMeeting and T.120 along with it. Conferencing vendors, especially more newly established companies, are avoiding and disparaging T.120.

In this decade, T.120 has been superceded by the simpler, sufficiently effective, notion of secondary video streams providing the “something a speaker wants to be seen”. Proprietary approaches have merged into the ITU-T Recommendation H.239 “Role management and additional media channels for H.300-series terminals”.

However, some see H.239 as not enough…