EVO 1.47.651.1 update breaks root. Images.

So while traveling through Wisconsin about an hour ago, my boyfriend’s and my own EVO notified us of the 1.47 update. He documented it as I drove by taking pictures with my EVO of his EVO of the step by step process. He also quickly downloaded a benchmarking app to compare before-and-after performance. Images with captions below. However, as discussed elsewhere, it does indeed break the root access  for tethering. But don’t fear, I am sure developers over at XDA are feverishly coding a work-around for that potentially life-changing annoyance.

The update takes about 6 to 10 minutes total. Some screens seem to hang possibly making the interested user who is watching the process (i.e., power users) try to re-boot. Don’t.

Here is the first pop-up after the initial notification that I clicked on:

After acknowledging the initial notification, this is the first screen.

After clicking OK, it takes you to this screen:

Second Screen showing a progress bar.

Then you will be taken to this minimalist screen.  It appears to hang, as there is no animation or progress bar. But it is working in the back ground. This goes on for a minute or two:

Appears to hang here, but all is ok.

The images were taken in a moving vehicle so please pardon the grainy/blurry shots.

The EVO reboots at this stage, and then returns to this image where the progress bar is really just an animation of a ‘completed process’ with a grayish candy-cane like spinning spiral along the bar. It spins like this for another minute or so:

Spinning candy-cane bar.

The EVO reboots again, but this time with the familiar HTC tones and pixelated Sprint imagery and the “4G” splash screen. However, the EVO hangs on this 4G image for about a minute (the two fingers being held up was my boyfriend capturing a reminder for us when we reviewed these photos that this screen stayed on for 2 minutes:

This screen hangs around for a couple of minutes.

Then this is one more reboot as the HTC finally boots to whatever your normal boot up screen is (in this case, it is his normal live-wallpaper background and slide lock. It is NOT a part of the upgrade)

After the 4G splash screen, settles in to your normal boot up screen.

And then once we opened the slide lock to see our main screens, we were welcomed with this congratulatory screen. However, after doing some benchmarks, we are not sure what we are being congratulated for. Perhaps that our phones didn’t get bricked as some have reported:

I did use Wi-Fi at a relatives home a short while later and was able to upload these pictures and several others (for a total of 24 pictures for a data total of about 40MB) in about 10 -14 minutes (I walked away for a few minutes before it finished uploading, this the time span). I am not sure if that is an improvement as I have not used my relatives Wi-Fi with my phone before this test.

I will post this now, but will edit it shortly (in an hour or 2) showing the before-and-after 1.47 update screen caps and stats for this particular EVO. I wansn’t too impressed, but then again this update wasn’t necessarily supposed to improve performance like Froyo is supposed to to.

Let me know if you had any issues with the EVO 1.47 update.

EVO Battery drain and the Apps that cause it (maybe).

I’ve had and power used the EVO for a week now, and I still love it, but there are a couple of things potential buyers and current owners should know. First, and foremost, the battery and the applications that plague it.

I am still toying with the settings, but if I the ability to control how apps run in the background is not natively configurable, Google will have to provide a patch that does allow a user to ‘set it and forget it’ where they can configure apps to “close (for real) upon exit”.

The battery life is horrid, absolutely horrid, on the EVO. But it may not be the battery that is the problem, and instead how Android keeps the apps running and opens a slew of ostensibly related other apps when just opening one app. For example, your Facebook app will also require your Internet control app to run.  Often, very often but interestingly not always,  other clearly not needed apps spawn such as “MP3 store”,” Sprint navigation”, ‘Voice dialer”, etc, simply by opening the Internet Browser, or Facebook App, or even simply scrolling over to another home screen on your phone (not accessing the Internet at all!). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So this is just my hypothesis, but the notorious battery drain everyone is complaining about *may* be related to the plethora of apps that spawn when you don’t need them, and stay running on the Android OS after you have closed the initial program that absurdly caused them to spawn.

And how did I see these plethora of apps running? That’s another issue that is not too terrible, but Android does not ship with a few apps that I find are essential to using a smart phone. One being a task manager. Granted, there is one but it is buried a few layers deep (i.e.., no direct shortcut in the “apps” page) and it does not show you all the apps that are running. In that regard, you must go to the Android Market (app store) that IS wonderfully pre-installed on your device, and download a task manager. I down loaded the free “Advanced Task Killer” for this job, and it shows me all the apps that are running. Imagine my surprise when I first installed it and ran it to see 15 apps running in the background! 13 of which I was not currently using and had finished using hours before! Advanced Task Killer easily killed all the apps (except itself, of course) and runs terminally resident at the top border of your home screen for easy access. I have almost trained myself to religiously click it and wipe all running apps every time before I begin another application on my device for maximum performance of the app, and to prevent batter y drain. I have to do this each time, as I am flabbergasted at the long list of apps that spontaneously spawn just by looking at my “friends feed” app, for example. Another important note about killing all those apps is that it doesn’t prevent you from using those apps or even cause you to lose functionality (other than dynamic web form input or the last web page you were on, but we expect that to happen when we close our web browsers) when you killed them, nor does it turn off your Internet connection, ability to receive email, text, Google Talk, etc. notifications, when you kill the all these apps.  It is this reason that I do not understand why Android keeps these apps running in the background.

Once I spend a whole day on the beach where I have religiously killed every app other than the one I am using not only after using them, but AS I use them and killing all the ‘piggy backing’ apps that spawn from launching it, I will know if this is the sole cause of the heavy battery drain.

Fortunately, I am always near some form of electricity (car, home, work) but as I write this, I am on my way to a cruise ship and will in my cabin very little, and on a Caribbean beach a couple of days during said cruise. This is where my battery drain will cause me frustration. I will use those beach days to get 100 percent consistent with my Task Killing practice and see if the battery is able to maintain a respectable life span. If so, Google will indeed have to send out a patch.

About the Android Market, I spent all day perusing *just* the “free apps” section and found everything I needed for my initial repertoire of ‘power using’ apps I had enjoyed on my former Windows Mobile phone. The paid apps section provided decently priced ($1-$3 typically) apps as well as more advanced functionality of some of the free apps. I think I downloaded 35 apps in one 30 minute session when I first got the EVO. “Advanced task Killer” was one of these apps, and when I ran it, every single app I had just downloaded and installed (did not run, mind you) was still ‘running’ in the background. It was the first time and only time I experienced the normally zippy fast EVO to lag as I used it. Killing all those apps fixed that.

And finally, the Qik application is very cool but there is one thing you need to know. The app that comes pre-installed is NOT the app you need to video call someone else who has the same app. They don’t tell you this anywhere in the main paged of qik.com. Instead, they give you a “tutorial video” that gives you a cute tech girl explaining how wonderful the Qik video calling application is, then she proceeds to “make a call” but the video skips past showing where she clicked inside the application to initiate the call. This was intensely frustrating for me, because I was specifically watching that video to figure out where in the Qik app I could find the video calling ‘button”.  I was scanning her hand movements to see how she initiated that video call, then bam, it skips that part and just shows her ‘office buddy’ receiving the call in another part of the building. The video calling page even tells you to simply “pick from your contacts, and initiate the call!”. Turns out, you need to go the Android Market and  download and install over top of your pre-installed qik app the version that DOES allow video chat.  Thanks Qik, for causing me to burn 25 minutes figuring something out that you could have just “said” on your intro page. Furthermore, you were demoing the EVO 4G as the device you were using!

One thing I also want to add to that ‘tutorial’. They depict the video quality during their “trial” video call to be absolutely superb.  This would be because they were using their office Wi-Fi or true 4G network to make the call. If you are still on 3G, expect it to be very pixilated and only useable if you and your calling partner sit very still while chatting. That’s how my test went.

Aside from these issues, and a few I will blog about later, I do like the super fast response of the EVO and  I recognize a lot of my enthusiasm is because I am new to Android and very happy that the Android app store is huge enough, and growing, to allow me to do almost everything I was able to do with my old Windows Mobile phone.

HTC EVO 4G in hand

I didn’t quite realize when the guy at Radio Shack told me he would hold an HTC Evo back for me after the official launch day (Friday, June 4th) until Monday when I would get back from a trip, that he was doing me a great favor. My only commitment was a verbal promise to actually come get it (I believe he was supposed to charge me a $50 deposit, but if so, he waived that). I had assumed the Evo’s would sell well, but that I’d be able to find one SOME where on Monday. Obviously that was a bad assumption, but lo and behold when I called that Radio Shack guy back on Monday, he still had mine setting aside, after they reportedly were sold out everywhere in the U.S.

And boy am I happy. I’m loving the spiffy speed, and with the promised Android 2.2 update coming soon, should be 2 to 5 times spiffier. This thing is simply an iPhone with no restrictions, with a few trivial to substantial features the iPhone doesn’t have.  The iPhone has a few things as well, but to me they are not as important nor as substantial as the fact that I own this EVO, not Dan Hesse (Sprint), Eric Schmidt (Google), or Peter Chou (HTC), and I can install anything I damn well please on my new EVO. There is a known-by most toggle in the settings for the Android to “allow” non-market app installation (imagine that, Jobs), but in a day of perusing I’ve not be wanting an app I haven’t found in the Android Market, and I haven’t even left the “free” apps section yet.

If you are thinking about getting en EVO,  it is you for whom I am writing  this entry.

First let me say that this is not an anti-iPhone entry. the iPhone, as I’ve always said, has had that silky smooth superior to all other phones screen for years now. But my issue, as well as the issue with most power users, is the fact that you are forced to limit your entertainment and utility of the iPhone to what Apple decides for you. That’s a huge huge huge deal to me and so it would be very difficult for iPhone to surpass my intrigue with the EVO. With the EVO and Android, I can enjoy what I did with my HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile device. That was that I can imagine any kind of thing I want my phone to do (within reason), and some developer somewhere already made that app, and so did several other developers trying to out-do each other for bragging rights, resulting in various types of the same app that do several other things.

To give an idea of how ridiculously superior this kindof OS is to the iPhone OS, imagine if you will, someone writes a WinMobile app that uses your phone’s GPS to track a point where you are, and continues to track your steps until you tell it to stop. No need to imagine that, because it happened, by several devleopers all over the world, typically for geo-cashing or bike travel. Now, imagine a few years later some one makes a very simplified version of that, removing most of the features and just allowing it to record the GPS location of where ever you happened to be standing at the time you hit the button. Imagine they coded it for the iPhone, and called it “Find My Car’. Well, that happened and the guy raked in $400/day on that sub-$5 app.

Let me summarize if that was too confusing. A utility that has been available for *free* with a ton more features for another popular phone OS gets stripped down to just saying “You are here!” and sold for the iPhone and iPhone users pay out $400/day to this developer. By the way, that’s damn near the Holy Grail for the vast majority of basement developers out there.

Anyway, so it seems to me that if the iPhone is all you need and you are lack of want for further utility, ever, than maybe it’s for you. Otherwise, it is not.

Things you should know:

Installing “third party” apps (that is, apps not ‘approved’ for the Android Market) will require a simple setting change. I left it restricted at first, but just learned that Audible.com had created an Android app and I love my audible.com listening. So I changed the setting and the app installed perfectly.

In that same regard, installing third party apps typically requires you download or copy the file to your phone, then click on the file from within the phone. I looked in vein for a way to browse the files on my EVO until I finally Googled “‘how to” and “browse files” and “Andriod” and learned there are no natively installed file browers with Android (???). Nonetheless, I discovered a commonly referenced free file browser on the Android Market and it installed perfectly.

HTC EVO, here I come….

The HTC EVO is finally here, and I’ll be putting one through its paces. Being a long time WinMo user, being able to do just about any damned thing I want or need with it and then some, this Android device has a high bar to hurdle. But I think it will do fine.  Mainly because any apps I lose making the switch will be over shadowed by the 1Ghz snapdragon processor, huge screen, and..well.. it *is* android after all. Which means there will soon be if not already a vast numbers of freelance developers making any app I desire, like I enjoy with the WinMo.

HTC Evo comes equipped with a kick-stand for hands-free viewing.

The only issue I have is the $10 fee for unlimited data, which I already have on my HTC Touch Pro WinMo that I am NOT paying any extra for, and I am not in a 4G market.  Then, there is the $30/month “hotspot” feature, which I must admit is pretty cool even though I have the same hotspot ability on my HTC Touch Pro, and that is, unlike on my Touch Pro, you will be able to use the hotspot feature *and* talk on the phone at the same time. This opens up a big thing here… I will no longer need my Sprint 3G data card that I pay $60/month for. The only thing with that is the phone must be plugged in constantly to avoid battery drain if using it as a hotspot and as a phone at the same time. The data card I currently have is USB, so obviously it is always plugged in.. but then again I don’t use my data card for anything other than bringing in the 3G signal.

I’m certainly curious how it will work out for me. Let me know if you find any advantages or pitfalls for this flagship device.