Camp HD

If you would like more Internet on the go, Sprint presenting three 4G Android mobile phones from which to choose. The latest is the HTC EVO Shift 4G. It pairs HTC’s excellent Sense UI exposure to a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Despite some minor limitations, the EVO Shift 4G is usually a solid Android smartphone that gives a smoother software experience than most. It’s a good alternative if you locate the HTC EVO 4G and Samsung Epic 4G too large.

Design
The HTC Evo Shift 4G takes some style cues from its eye-catching, touch-only sibling, the HTC Evo 4G, but the Shift stands out on its own, simply because it combines high-quality look and feel. At 4.6 inches tall by 2.3 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick and 5.9 ounces, the slider smartphone is more comfortable to carry than the larger and wider Evo. In addition, the soft-touch finish and aluminum accents perform a far more premium feel than the Samsung Epic 4G, which felt a lttle bit plasticky and slick. Measuring 3.6 inches diagonally, the Evo Shift’s display is a bit small compared to the ones on its keyboard-equipped competitors–the Epic 4G incorporates a 4-inch touch screen, whereas the T-Mobile G2 has a 3.7-inch display–so you won’t enjoy quite as much screen housing while browsing the Web or viewing multimedia.

Keyboard
The Shift 4G’s keyboard slides out smoothly without feeling too loose. Overall, HTC did an excellent job here. There’s plenty of space between the keys, they’re nicely backlit, so we like the easily identifiable Fn key.

Specs and Performance
The HTC Evo Shift 4G has 2GB ROM/512MB RAM and like the T-Mobile G2, the smartphone is equipped with next-gen 800MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 processor. Though most high-end smartphones are running 1GHz processors, we didn’t find any side effects to performance. The Evo Shift was responsive throughout our review period. Apps launched quickly, and that we didn’t experience any significant delay when switching between tasks.

Camera and Camcorder
The 5-megapixel auto-focus camera includes an LED flash. Oddly, there isn’t any front-facing camera. Test photos were OK, but not great; the auto-focus had loads of trouble keeping images sharp, although no less than it was fast. Indoor images were dark colored unless I was standing near a window. The LED flash added excess noise. Recorded 1280-by-720-pixel HD videos were reasonably well lit and averaged 18 fps. But that latter figure is misleading, as the rate peaked near 30 fps in bright rooms and fell to the single digits in dimmer areas.

Call Quality and Battery life
Call quality was good. On our end, the audio was clear with very little background noise or voice distortion. Friends also reported good quality of sound. Speakerphone quality was OK. The sound was mostly clear with ample volume to hear callers in louder environments, but the audio was obviously a bit tinny. We had no problems pairing the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset or the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones. The HTC Evo Shift 4G ships with a 1,500mAh lithium ion battery having a rated talk-time of 6 hours. We had arrived able to dig up 6.5 hours of continuous talk time on a single charge in this battery drain tests. On the whole, we were able to dig up in regards to day’s worth of use with 50/50 3G and 4G use.