HTC EVO 3D Smartphone Review

Our first impression when we picked up the EVO 3D and started using the phone was, "Wow, this seems fast." Indeed, in comparison to the single-core 1GHz processor on the EVO and other single-core phones we've seen in recent months, the EVO 3D and Android 2.3 certainly do appear to perform certain tasks more quickly.

The EVO 3D's qHD display is very sharp and colorful as well. In 2D mode, pictures, web pages, and other content look crisp. As with many other smartphones today, the display can be difficult to view under direct sunlight. Viewing angles on the EVO 3D's qHD display were very good.

Click to enlarge

When viewing 3D images, you'll need to hold the phone directly in front of you. If you view the 3D image at even a slight angle, the image will look blurry. Also, the 3D images aren't going to compare with what you might see at a movie theater. The 3D definitely adds some dimension to the photos, but they're not flying in your face.

During our testing of the camera, images were a bit hit and miss. Some of our 2D images were off a bit in color, as you can see from some of our test shots below. In addition, photos taken indoors without using the camera's flash were often blurry. Most of our 3D images turned out well, though.

Click to enlarge

Sprint claims you should get up to 6.0 hours of continuous talk time from the EVO 3D's user-replaceable battery. In our everyday usage tests, the EVO 3D's battery easily lasted for a few days under light usage. During heavy-use days, we generally made it through the workday (8+ hours) on a single charge.

In an attempt to put a quantitative measure on the EVO 3D's battery life, we set up our own Web-surfing test. In this test, we set up a webpage with a mix of graphics and text. The page automatically refreshed itself every three minutes.

We set the EVO 3D's display to 50% brightness and turned off Wi-Fi. When we ran this, the EVO 3D did well, lasting for 5 hours and 35 minutes before it died.