Hardware & Design
The EVO View 4G is a slate style tablet. It has a thick but light frame surrounding it with a brushed finish. The screen is a 7 inch capacitive touch screen display that is sharp with vivid colors. One the side there is a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera. On the bottom you have your touch sensitive buttons for menu, home, back and pen stylus input. These icons will also rotate when in landscape mode. On the sides you have your volume button, micro USB port, power button and 3.5 MM headphone jack.
On the back there are stereo speakers and a 5 megapixel main camera with 720p video capture. The quality is pretty good for a tablet. Still images come out clear but have a soft tone to them when it comes to color. The video products the same in terms of clarity and color. Indoor quality however is not good at all for images or video.
Inside there is a 1.5 Ghz single core processor, 1 GB of ram, 8 GB of Built in storage with a micro SD card slot capable to handle up to 32GB of storage. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS round-up the specs of this device. The tablet has some weight to it but it’s evenly distributed and has a very nice solid feel to it.
Software & Usability
The EVO View 4G runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread with HTC Sense 3.0 skin on top of it. It will be a familiar interface for those that have you HTC phones in the past. The improved graphics and fluidity of Sense UI gives a great user experience. For typing they have included both the standard HTC keyboard and Swype and both work well. There is some preloaded software but not a lot of it is bloatware and contains more software you would use on a tablet. One cool software is HTC Watch where you can download movies and trailers to watch right on the device.
One of the big selling points is the Pen Stylus input with HTC Scribe. By taking the pen and tapping on the green pen icon on the side you can bring up the notes applications where you can draw and right on the screen. There is a multiple amount of pen options from pencil, pen, brushes and so on to choose from. Yon can also interact other applications with the Stylus. By just tapping on the screen you will take a screenshot that you can edit. In the Books app you can highlight text and bookmark pages. However this doesn’t work in emails or text messages so it feels more like a add-on than a necessity.
Battery life is pretty good last a full day with moderate usage. The 4G reception is solid and works as expected. The overall performance is smooth with no hiccups or lag. This is the best use of android on a tablet that is not Android 2.3 honeycomb.
Overall
This is one solid tablet. Usually Android 2.x tablet are not that great when it comes to the user experience. HTC uses Sense UI here to create that experience necessary. One advantage of it being Android 2.3 is that there are way more apps available for it than Android 3.0 but the downside is that all android tablets are moving to honeycomb and the app support will be bigger eventually there. The HTC Scribe pen is more of a luxury than a necessity on the tablet. It works and can do a lot for you but its limited as to what it can do in the OS itself. The EVO View 4G is a good tablet for those looking for a good tablet with solid battery life and good portability.
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