Gadgetory

hey guys its brand am in a min from pocketnow.com sprint is really pushing the 4g function of the evo 4g and rightly so it's the first smartphone in the United States to have 4G data but our question is does for cheap really matter well in this video we're going to try to answer that question let's get to it okay so I'm going to start off by talking broadly about 4G and then i'm going to show you 4g i have 4g in my area i live near philadelphia so i can actually show you what it's like to use this device as it was intended and by the way if my voice sounds a little raspy i'm just getting over a cold so hopefully my voice doesn't break up too much so 4g generally speaking is the next evolution of cellular data we have 3g 3.5 g and now we have 3g which is built on clears wimax network to put this into some context on your 3g phone that you have on AT&T Sprint Verizon t-mobile or any other global carrier you probably get speeds between 1 and say two point five megabits per second download speed now if you are at home on a Wi-Fi router you would probably get a maximum of maybe 10 to 12 megabits per second if you had a very fast connection on the other hand sprint 4G can do a theoretical 10 megabits per second so if you put it into the context of what I just said that's like having a Wi-Fi connection wherever you are which is a pretty compelling prospect but as we're going to discover later it's not so simple and it doesn't really work so smoothly and easily and it's not that fast yet so what I'm going to do now is cut to some speed benchmarks that I ran around my town to try to get the fastest speed possible on sprint's 4g network then I'm going to show you a web browsing session over 4g i'll be back in a sec okay so before i show you some of the speed so that I got a note on the 3g 4g and Wi-Fi connections because obviously that's a lot to handle for a device let me tell you how the evo 4g doesn't the device always will favor Wi-Fi first we'll go to 4G second if you have it turned on here and then 3g left and it switches very seamlessly between 4g and 3g ifm so that is not a problem so i've been using two different benchmarking software versus the speedtest net application and the other one is the extreme lab speed test but let me show you what I got from speedtest net I think this is one of the most reliable benchmarking tools I'm going to go into results I've run a ton of tests and the fastest that i have found was right here for megabits per second up or down i should say and one megabit per second up and then was this was really in the heart of Philadelphia I had three out of three four g bars right now I have zero out then now I've 14 g bar and so to me this really represents the real world maximum that is Kate that is this device is capable of right now sprint says you should be able to get up to ten or even three to six I'm not seeing I'm not seeing six I'm not seeing a five I am seeing for megabits per second and it's always about one up on average it's about three and if you think about that again in context of what you get over 3g it's not that much faster right now and perhaps Philadelphia has slowed 4g but that really doesn't make any sense so that's what we're dealing with now I want to show you the hotspot application since I do have a little bit of 4G maybe you can get a feel for how fast it is this is a $29 per month feature this is a demo unit so sprint has added this to this device and I've got it set up I put a little password I'm going to turn this on it's very easy to use but to bring out my iPad and show you the speeds i'm getting over 4g you can see i am over 4g a very limited signal right now but let's jump over to the ipad okay so here we are on the ipad mmm reading the New York Times here so I'm going to go to settings and change my access point to evo here it is and over here on the EVO 4G it just said one connected users and so it's going to connect right now and I'm going to go to that speedtest.net application see how fast the speed is here on 4G we're still on 4G we're kind of varying between zero bars and one bar so really won't represent how fast it is but again I just show you some some speed benchmarks that did let's see what we get nothing too great and again this is one of the problems with 4G is if you have zero bars or one bars or two bars you're going to get slow speeds compared to 3g if you have you know one bars or two bars or three bars that's depending on sort of the granularity of the signal strength you get a pretty fast 3g signal you need to have a full 4g signal to really tap the speeds of the network so i'm going to jump to a video now where i do have a pretty full signal and we're browsing the web want to jump to that now all right so we've got a relatively strong 4g signal here right now two out of three bars actually just had three out of three bars want to show you what it's like to browse the web first let's do a quick speed test and we just actually went down into 3g and this actually happens a lot for no reason a good 4g signal will go down to a 3g signal and so we're only going to get about one megabit per second but a cancel this and hope that it goes back to 4G okay so we're back in 4G let's go to the other speed test application really would love to benchmark this with you watching okay so we've got a very strong 4g signal here we should really get to see how this thing can do my guess is we're going to get this is this is good so we got about 3.1 megabits per second that's pretty representative of what you're going to get over 4g in most cases and about 1 megabit per second up let's get out of this and jump into the web and see what it's like to browse the internet / / 4G if the internet icon wants to respond all right here we are on once again we've been bumped down to 3G so let me put in okay now calm here and maybe will if you will switch back so over 3g it's pretty darn fast let me go into landscape just going to jump around and hope that we're going to go back into the 4g so i'm going to zoom in a little bit tap on that headline all right and finally we're back on 4g i went to the settings and i saw that it dropped off keeps doing that let's go back into the internet and hopefully we can get it so that we're on 4g for a while so right now we're on 4g loading pocket now calm and let's put it back into landscape so it's it's fast it feels as if i'm on a Wi-Fi connection rather than a cellular connection so let me go to engadget.com see how fast that comes up okay so we got the mobile version let's jump down to hopefully the full version that option is here it is down here to load the full engadget experience mmm alright so it's going to load the main engadget page that you get on the desktop let's see what that looks like and how fast it loads so again it's not super ultra fast it's like you're on a very fast cellular connection or kind of slow Wi-Fi network that's pretty much what it's like so before I answer the question does 4G matter let me point out three weaknesses that I see of sprint's 4g network right now that is keeping me from really loving this 4G thing number one the signal reliability is not as great as it is on 3g for example i'm walking down a city block on 3g on my nexus one or any other phone and from block to block i have a consistent signal if i started four bars i'll probably be it for bars by the end of the block on 4g that's not the case reliability of the signals not so good i need to get the start of the block with three out of three at the end of the block i'm at zero bars so that's problem when problem number two is that the speeds aren't that fast right now and I've tested this you saw the benchmarks in the center of Philadelphia the fastest i saw was about four megabits per second which is about two times faster than the 3g speeds approximately that's significant but not not amazing problem number three of the 4g network is that it's not ubiquitous it's not even close to ubiquitous as 3G has become so I think that where we are going is obviously towards a future where every handset every smartphone has super fast wireless internet so you can get downloads as fast as you would get on your desktop computer video chat becomes possible on a lot of other stuff that we haven't really even seen you but right now with the 4g network in its infancy it really doesn't matter that much i have to tell you that using a nexus one over 3g and an EVO 4g over 4g feels about the same there are very few instances where I'm like oh wow that web page loaded fast or wow I really download that attachment so much faster it's just not that much of a difference right now so does 4G matter I'd say right now it does not matter the 4g is somewhat any novelty really a marketing point that sprint has added to the evo 4g 4g has a bright future there's no doubt but right now it's a novelty please give the video a thumbs up if you like what you saw and 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