With my last post about T-Mobile, I said I went to Sprint. When I left the T-Mobile store Saturday after returning my HTC Sensation, I walked right across the mall concourse to the Sprint Store and started asking question. I knew Phil wanted an iPhone, and I had an idea about what kink of phone I wanted. The clerk ran my credit, set my account up, and said that I was pre-approved for up to 5 lines without a security deposit (a needless redundancy since I only need two). anyway, I didn’t get them then since I had to settle a few affairs. After being told how much the phones were and that I was preapproved, my brother texted back that he could pay for them himself.
So next Wednesday, we were in the Sprint store in the South Hill Mall in Pukeallup, picking out phones. I was going to get an EVO 4G, mainly because of it’s similarity to my HD2 (I knew that there were Energy ROMs being for it, and that there was a2sd support for it). But they didn’t have any in stock (it’s actually been discontinued/in the process of being discoe’ed). So I went with the EVO 3D. I’m glad I did. With the announced release of HTC’s ‘One’ series, it may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer anymore, but it’s still got what counts. When it comes to internal phone memory and processor, it’s essentially a Sensation, so there’s no real surprise there. Even though it had a gB available to the user, I can still run out of space really quick, but liberal use of apps2sd attenuates that problem. Compared to what I was running, it just zips along. Even a reboot after wiping the Dalvik cache take less time than it did for my HD2 to do a normal reboot (reboot after wiping the Dalvik cache took over 30 minutes on my HD2). Add that to the one gigabyte of RAM, and it has more power than my first computer (which was capable of running windows XP).
So I get my phone, and I find I have to do the official HTC unlocking in order to root it (what’s the point in getting Android if I can’t root it?). It took a few tries (ended up having to download the RUU and reinstalling it in order to get it to unlock). For about 3 days, I just ran the stock ROM. Out of the box, it runs Gingerbread on Sense 3.0 (just like the Sensation). Saturday, I discovered that the stock ROM is compatible with UOT kitchen, so I can change the icon sets (mainly I wanted to change the battery indicator). Sunday night, I finally worked up the courage to wipe it and flash a custom ROM (a difference from when I had the Sensation. With that phone, I had the custom ROM downloaded, tweaked and ready to flash before I bought it). I finally found a Sense 3.5 ROM and downloaded it Sunday. It wasn’t an Energy ROM (he doesn’t cook for the EVO 3D), but I gave it try. Installed all of my apps and moved into it Monday, and it crashed and burned on me Tuesday on my way to work. So Tuesday when I came home from work, I decided to try my hand at a Frankenstein ROM. So this time, I took a few elements from the Energy ROMs that I’ve downloaded from my phones and cooked them into my ROM. And I’m pretty impressed with it.
But there was drawback: space. My memory card had a second, hidden partition for a2sd (which I used on my HD2). None of the a2sd scripts I used would work on this phone. Then I saw one the on of the xda fora someone mention link2sd. It’s free and available on the market. Installed it, and it recognized my ext4 partition. So I can install all my 300+ apps on a phone that has the horsepower to run them. The main drawback to having your apps installed on your sd card is that you just pull your sd card (with windows mobile, the sd card was hot pluggable). But the again, I have to pull the battery out to get to the memory card on this phone.
All in all, I think I’m going to enjoy this phone. And there’s a forthcoming upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich due shortly, too (there are a few ice cream sandwich builds out there, but I’ll wait for the official HTC one first). Did I mention that my brother paid for this? And he willingly surrendered his man-card?
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