I’ve been a Sprint user for over 10 years, at least according to Amanda, who cheerfully explained to me why my cell phone bill never makes sense but that they appreciate my loyalty anyway as she sold me my new phone a couple of weeks ago.

My new phone is the HTC EVO 3D, but enough about that for now. First, it’s important to talk about my PREVIOUS phone, which was the very underrated Samsung Moment.

The Moment was a very early generation Android phone which managed to hit just about all the design elements I wanted. Despite being a bit too slow (Angry Birds never played quite right) and missing out on simple things like multi-touch which Samsung apparently left out to get it to market quickly and inexpensively, it was one of my favorite phones. My Moment was a replacement for a Palm Treo which dutifully kept by my side for several years (forever in smartphone land).

The Moment was a wide slide-out keyboard styled phone. If anyone is reading this that designs phone keyboards, go pick this up and play with it — it’s the best. The keys are clearly separated and slightly raised so that touch-typing, such that is is on a teensy-weensy keyboard is actually possible. I wasn’t quite able to bang out entire novellas without looking, but I could get pretty far into a decent text message with minimal mistakes while watching Netflix. The keyboard rocked.

Moreover, the Moment set aside the typical 4-button Android interface (Home, Menu, Back, Search) that seems prolific, instead opting for the three required buttons (Home, Menu, Back), and two buttons dedicated to phone operation (Pickup and Hangup, where the Hangup button also acted as a power button for the overall phone). Most importantly, though, the phone had a tiny touchpad that depressed as a select button. I haven’t seen better cursor control on any smart phone, although the Palm and the Blackberry dedicated rollerballs and rockers are fairly close.

The HTC EVO 3D with which I now entertain myself boasts none of this coolness. The more-than-4-inch screen is gorgeous, responsive (the phone is wicked fast), and I’ve whittled down the on-screen keyboard options to a few that I like (I’m currently using SwiftKey X which has a curious habit of predicting words when nothing has been typed — it currently assumes that I want to say “I am a beautiful person.” if I don’t give it any other starting letters). But it’s not as cute or cuddly as the Samsung Moment.

But, and this is very important:

IT TAKES 3D PHOTOS!

(more…)

I don’t really like to rant, but sometimes I think a PSA is required…

I picked up a Palm Pre last week, and took it back after like five days. I loved my many Palms — I found the original charger for my very first Palm Pilot the other day. Right now, I have a Treo 700p, which was one of the first touch-screen, web enabled, awesome happy smart phones out there, and after a week with the Pre, I’m more than happy to keep it for a little while.

I actually went through TWO Pre’s. After seeing reviews online about them being “slow”, but still pretty good all around, I make the following prediction: Something is very wrong with SOME Pres — enough to be a big problem, and either Palm is just replacing affected phones or people just aren’t complaining loudly enough. I say this because there are enough people who are happy with their phones that they certainly couldn’t have had the experience I did, so something must be different.

In short, I had two major problems. First, the phone was so slow as to be completely unuseable. Yes, lots of reviews say that it’s slow, but they don’t give any real examples. Here’s one for you: it took me THREE MINUTES to make a phone call not even using the Contacts app (I typed the phone number in directly). The contacts list never worked for me. I waited until it was finished syncing with my Facebook and Google addresses and it NEVER let me scroll to the bottom of my contact list. It would always hang at some point “loading” more contacts and never let me scroll any farther.

That’s just inane.

My screen flickered on and off for no reason — I have video of it taking 45 seconds for the screen to come on and STAY on (not BOOT, mind you, just open the charged, turned on phone). No apps running, no syncing going on, nothing.

Battery life was abysmal. Not “bad” not, “I nearly made it through the day”… no… an overnight charge (9+ hours) got the battery to read 80% charged, and spending less than five minutes browsing the web and trying to make a phone call the phone was DEAD 90 minutes later.

So I took it back, and got a replacement Pre, and exactly the same thing happened.

Either there’s a really crappy batch of Palm Pres out there, largely in the Dayton area, or I’m just really unlucky, or something. I’m at a loss. There are plenty of comments around from other people with the same problems, but we seem to be a small percentage of the Pre population.

Still, even if the apps worked as advertised, the phone wasn’t as useful as an old Treo or the Blackberries out there, so, for the forseeable future, no Palm for me. YMMV.