HTC Evo 4G LTE

In my earlier post, I compared HTC One X against Samsung Galaxy S3. At the time, I had considered those two phones to be the best Android phones released so far. Less than a month later, HTC has come out with Evo 4G LTE touting it to be the best Android phone.

Is it better than the One X or Galaxy S3? I watched and read its’ reviews by numerous people online. Here is Nicole doing a review of the Evo 4G on TWiT:

According to her, the differences between the One X and Evo 4G are very few. The Evo has a kickstand and an aluminium finish, while the One X doesn’t have a kickstand and has a poly-carbonate finish. Another major difference is that the Evo has a microSD slot.

Another impressive review of Evo 4G by Nathan Olivarez-Giles of Wired emphasizes that the Evo is Sprint’s version of the HTC One X on AT&T. According to Tyler Lee on ubergizmo, there are strong rumours that the Samsung Galaxy S3 will be on all US networks.

Considering Sprint does not have a 4G network, using Sprint network has been ruled out. So, the HTC Evo 4G might be a good alternative to HTC One X, but not my choice, as I would prefer to use a 4G network.

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Installing custom ROM on HTC Wildfire S

A couple of days ago, my phone (Wildfire S) crashed on me and went into a looping boot screen. After researching till 3 am in the morning, I couldn’t find any solution to it. Finally, I gave up and wiped the whole thing to factory reset. Fortunately, I had set the phone to auto-backup every Sunday with Titanium Backup.

As I had posted earlier, I had already been facing problems of low internal storage on my phone. So, I decided this would be a good time to start fresh. Now I only re-installed apps from the backups as and when needed. With Link2SD installed, I still had almost 80 MB free.

During my research to come up for solutions to get the phone out of the boot loop, I came across a few posts on XDA Developers forums. I had done a lot of searching on those forums six months ago for new custom ROMs for my phone. Since it was so hard to root this phone, developers had not been interested in making ROMs for it. During those past six months, HTC Dev site released a way to root the phone. I’m guessing that caused more interest in developers to create ROMs for it.

In those same forums, now I was coming across many posts promoting different custom ROMs. Now, since I had wiped the phone and had confidence that I can restore (most of) my apps and data, I figured I should mess around with some custom ROMs and see what benefits it has. Apparently, installing custom ROMs is all about changing the whole UI plus giving more freedom to overclock the CPU and removing a lot of bloatware which comes with phone.

There were a lot of custom ROMs to choose from. Tigger31337 on those forums compiled a list of all the available ROMs and features of all of them. I went through the list and wanted to install the Cyanogen Mod (the unofficial version) since everyone had praises of Cyanogen’s ROMs in general. For some reason, the installation didn’t work on my phone. The next one I picked was Hense Mod 7. It has Sense, overclocking, and only uses 52 MB of internal memory.

After installing, the first thing I noticed, was the lock screen. It was similar to the ICS lock screen. I went about re-installing my apps and changing launcher, there wasn’t anything different visually. A lot of apps, including most of the Google apps, had been removed. In the background, the overclocking probably increased the CPU speed. It’s not apparent in daily use. I guess I have to take the developer’s word for it! ;)

Overall, it was a good experience to have changed the whole ROM and the sense of knowing that I could do it! Will probably try another ROM soon! :)

One X or Galaxy S III?

Recently HTC launched their top of the line Android phone, the HTC One X. Not to be left far behind, Samsung just announced it will soon launch their top of the line Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy SIII.

With the excitement of my returning to USA, I have already started researching which phone I will be buying. I have been an Android fan since a long time. Tried the iOS on other people’s iPhones, but given the the flexibility of Android and the vast array of choices it offers, Android wins hands down!

So, with the reviews coming out of the two new Android phones, I am debating which one should be the phone I get. My decision might get skewed by which carrier I choose to go with, but that is for another day.

Came across a very good extensive review of the HTC One X by Eileen Rivera of TWiT:

The only con of this model that is holding me back is the fact that there is no expandable microSD slot. But, given the fast 4G LTE networks, I might be able to work with the given 16GB memory and store backups, music, photos and documents on the cloud.

Since Samsung has not released the Galaxy S III in the US as yet, I had to look for reviews done by journalists in UK. Matt Warman of The Telegraph did a very extensive review.

As it happened with the One X, chances are, the Galaxy S III will also only have dual core processor to accommodate for LTE network capability. Apart from that, there is not much noticeable difference between the two except the S3’s expandable microSD slot.

Unfortunately, both phones have one con in common: the size! But given all the capabilities of the new smartphones, manufacturers need bigger batteries installed, for that they have just kept increasing the size of the phone. I guess I’ll need to get used to carrying a big phone! :(

So far, they are both on par if I disregard the microSD option. Now, the main question comes, which network will have the Galaxy S III and at what price? AT&T has announced the One X at $200 but Amazon Wireless is giving a $50 discount on it.

I think my decision can go either ways, depending on my carrier choice and the price of the S3.

Lets see what they come up with. I have more than two months to decide! Hopefully the prices will have gone lower by then! :)