Cell Phone Review: Evo Design 4G by HTC

The EVO 4G released in 2010 impressed a lot of mobile phone lovers being the ambassador of WiMAX and a big superphone screen at 4.3 inches. So how will the recently EVO Design 4G compare with its older sibling? If you want to know, read on our review of the EVO Design 4G.

In terms of design, this new EVO phone has no wow factor. Do not get us wrong, it feels premium but when you know when you hold it that there should be something better with this HTC. It may lack flair but the soft to the touch rubber, glass, and brushed aluminum gives it a feeling far from cheap. It has a unibody architecture that hugs the 4.3 inch screen and houses its capacitive buttons. It has a dimension of 121x61x12mm and that is a bit thick plus the camera swells on its back.

The LCD display is very crisp even on a smaller screen compared to its predecessor. The 960 by 540 pixel screen displays great color even in unusual angles.
Then 5 megapixel camera is sufficient and should not be counted out. The focusing capability is decently quick even for macro shots. The capture time is also very snappy most times but there can also be washed out images due to the limits of color reproduction.

The EVO Design 4G runs on Gingerbread 2.3.4 and has a design language that replaced the old Sense’s locks, app drawers, home screens, and every layer in between. It looks good but there will be times that its 1.2 Gigahertz processor will be performing rough compared to the smoothness of the Galaxy S II or the iPhone 4. If you will be getting the EVO Design 4G under contract, you can also expect some bloatware to come with it from the provider. HTC though promises an upgrade in the near future to Ice Cream Sandwich.
Performance wise, this phone running on Android will be a lot better if it has a minimum set up of a dual-core brain so it will have the horsepower it needs.

The EVO Design 4G from HTC gives you the best value for your hard earned money. It is well made, nice screen, and very affordable but the phone trying to become a jack of all trades pours in more negativity to its side.

>>Learn more

Auto Memory Manager ( Android)

Memory Thresholds
The app lets you set six memory thresholds to tweak performance:
Foreground Applications: Apps that you can currently see on screen. System and Phone are included in this group.

Visible Applications: Apps which are visible to the user but not running forefront.

Secondary Server: Apps and services running in the background. This group includes SenseUI and Launcher.

Hidden Applications: Apps that are not visible but are still running in the background.

Content Provider: Processes that provide content such as Contact and Calendar apps.

Empty Applications: Apps that are in standby and not doing any work.

You can set thresholds levels for a pre-defined group of applications. For instance, by setting the threshold level for the Empty Applications group to 40MB, if the phone’s available memory falls below 40MB then the system will kill empty applications to free up memory.

There are three threshold levels: Aggressive (the highest setting), Mild: (the average setting), and Default (whichkeeps you Android device's original settings).

Auto Memory Manager’s default level is set so that Empty Applications are first to get killed when less than 40MB of memory is available. Foreground apps are given highest priority, only killed if there is less that 6MB of memory available. These settings are customizable.

There’s a “Preferences” setting for further customization. Users can allow the app to send a developer an email when an error occurs as well as allow the collection of data usage.

Auto Memory Manager also displays running processes and provides more details than the native ‘Running Services’ or when viewing cached services on my Droid. In Auto Memory Manager, you can see the Out of Memory priority (OOM) of each service. OOM is scaled from -16, the highest priority to +15, the lowest priority. Auto Memory manager also shows associated software running in each process. What’s really informative is that each process is grouped into one of the six threshold levels that the app uses, so you can set threshold levels depending on what services and processes are most important.

I had only one issue; a crash when viewing processes. I had to force the app to close.

Rating Performance
It’s hard to gauge how much an app like this improves or doesn’t improve the way an Android phone runs, when only running it for a short time. I’ve had it running for a weekend. I tested how much better my phone performs with Auto Memory Manager than without it by firing up the usual apps I have running at once: Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Alarm Clock, Email and also a graphics-heavy time management game that I love called Stand O' Food which takes a lot of memory resources. This game usually freezes and locks up with all the apps I typically have running. I got decent gameplay, with Auto Memory Manager running. The game still locked up on me, but only once. This can be attributed to the game’s code of course, but I did have less locking which would happen quite frequently.

This improvement leads me to surmise that Auto memory Manager provides some level of system performance gain. There’s a learning curve in that you would need to experiment with threshold levels to determine which configuration suits your phone’s needs best. What I really like about this app most, is that it gives users a good look into the way memory is used; for that alone it is worth four stars.

More Android App Reviews:
• Auto Memory Manager (for Android)
• Angry Birds Space
• Bitdefender Mobile Security (for Android)
• X-plore
• Lookout for Android
• more

>>Learn more