Earlier this week, we compared the iPhone and Android in a knockdown showdown of features that matter to us. Upset with the lack of representation for webOS, reader Rothgarrepurposed our chart and offered this thoughtful (and sometimes angry) counterpoint.

I understand that the iPhone is the king of the hill (well technically RIM is but they suck anyway and are only ahead because of the giant corporate following) and Android is the new buzz word, but how can so many comparisons just ignore webOS, the most intuitive, productive, and flexible platform? Honestly I really am sick of the fact that webOS is left out of most mobile device comparisons simply because the “tech industry” doesn’t use it because it isn’t cool enough to get headlines.

The only thing that gets webOS into the headlines is when one of their amazing and thought provoking creators leaves Palm to work for another company. Why is this big news if webOS sucks? The truth is, webOS is fantastic and these other mobile operating systems will benefit from the talent behind webOS. But that doesn’t mean webOS is going to lose out because webOS is already ahead of all the competition.

The thing that has held webOS back is the fact that it was only on two phones and one of those phones had questionable build quality. But lets face it, there will be a new webOS phone in the future and I think we can all assume that Palm/HP aren’t stupid about what hardware they need to use for the next webOS phone. The thing that finally made me write this rant was Lifehacker’s article comparing iPhone to Android. I mean really, I understand that both platforms just announced major updates, (iOS 4 and Android 2.2) but I think that webOS, which hasn’t seen a major update for at least 4 months, is still ahead of the game and I think it is about time that people start to recognize it.

I took the liberty to fix Lifehacker’s article to actually take into account all three competing mobile operating systems in the consumer market.

Ed. note: We highlighted just how subjective our criteria were in our original post. Where Rothgar completely disagreed with our criteria, he slapped a big Bogus stamp across that category. Here’s to an open dialog!

Ease of use; Winner: 2-way tie
This one we can call a tie between iOS 4 and webOS because both interfaces are just as easy to launch and run apps and both have little things that you need to get used to. Double tapping the home screen to switch apps isn’t super intuitive and neither is forward/back gestures in webOS. In either case, Android is the loser.

Openness; Winner: webOS
Obviously iOS loses here, Android is open source for its core OS and allows installing apps from outside of the marketplace but so does webOS. Where webOS takes the cake is the fact that there is no rooting of your phone to get access to parts that are supposed to be locked down. How to root the phone is FREAKING IN THE DOCUMENTATION!!! It doesn’t get any more open then that. And lets not forget the open nature of the platform to allow apps to be written in HTML, CSS, Javascript, or C/C++ if you want. Due to this wide open nature, amazing things like Preware has been made available to tweak every last “kernel” of your phone.

Google also loses by making their “default” apps (Gmail, Maps, etc.) completely closed source and even takes down anyone who tries to share them. Palm on the other hand has written every built in app according to the standards they hold their developers to and made the apps all open source so you could see exactly how they built the app. Android and webOS are both fairly open, but webOS is more open and is the winner here.

Battery Life; Winner: Bogus catagory
What is this doing here?!? This has everything to do with hardware and almost nothing to do with software. In any case, I think we can agree that Android loses this category with almost zero battery conserving settings and complaints on almost every Android device. This is a bogus comparison when trying to compare mobile operating systems. If this were a debate between the iPhone 4, Evo 4G, and Palm Pre Plus this would be a perfectly valid comparison.

Multitasking; Winner: webOS
This is a no brainer. WebOS does multitasking better than any other mobile OS available period. Android is the only other one that even can run apps in the background but there is a reason that a task killer is the first thing every Android phone needs. And lets not even get into the difference between running apps and using approved services and fast app switching.

Software Keyboard; Winner: 2-way tie
iOS has evolved into the best software keyboard and Android actually gives you options for keyboards, I would call this a tie because if you want to use swype on Android, you can. A software keyboard is only good if you are used to its idiosyncrasies and can use it. Personally, I rarely have to get used to a hardware keyboard, but webOS doesn’t even have a proper soft keyboard option.

System-Wide Search; Winner: 3-way tie
They all have it, they all work about the same with the same oddities and features. It is a tie. But just for the record, Android and webOS did it first.

Notification System; Winner: webOS
Once again iOS is the clear loser here, and while I liked the idea of Android’s curtain at first it just plain sucks after using it for a few months. I can’t clear a single notification without clearing all of the notifications and I can’t have extended controls in a notification. I know it is possible, but in all the apps I have installed, I have never seen actual controls inside the notification, just an icon that always stays there and opens the app when pressed.

Voice-to-text; Winner: Android
This works really well 80% of the time in Android and is the clear winner without a doubt. The bad thing is, I only use it 5% of the time I am inputting any text. So it is great 4% of the time I input text but really wouldn’t be a missed function and I still would prefer a proper physical keyboard.

Syncing; Winner: 2-way tie
Who the hell wants to plug their phone into their computer anyway? iOS loses here because you need iTunes for updates and setup. Android is great as long as you use Gmail and have a Google account. WebOS creates an account for you and stores all of your settings AND apps installed. So with webOS, if you break/lose your phone, you can log in with your Palm account and not only do all your settings from every service (sans Facebook) come back, but the apps you had installed come too.

Non-Google Syncing; Winner: webOS
Ever heard of Synergy? You probably haven’t, but it wins. Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Exchange are all there, out of the box. There is not contest here.

Tethering; Winner: webOS
iOS is just now putting this feature in but because it has the typical Apple restrictions, (no teather in to the iPad, really?) and Android still costs money on any carrier that will allow it, webOS wins because it is available on the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus and is completely free on Verizon. Yes I know if you root your Android phone you can do it for free, guess what, you can do the same thing in iOS and webOS so no one cares. Heck, Windows Mobile 6.1 had this feature and it worked great and was always free, doesn’t mean WM is any good.

Release/Update Consistancy; Winner: Bogus Catagory
HUH?!? really? What does this have to do with how good a mobile OS is? because you know you will get an update every year? Is Windows better because you get patches every first Tuesday of the month? Or the fact that a new and improved Windows will come out every 3-5 years? NO it makes it worse. This shouldn’t even be on this list.

Customizable; Winner: 2-way tie
If we are talking about user customizations, Android wins hands down. Widgets are great, icons can be placed almost anywhere, and you can set anything you want as a background image. But if we want to talk about the underlying OS, that is a win for webOS. Just go look up Preware and kernel patches and then come back and see why I picked this as a tie for Android and webOS. Oh and I agree, webOS needs to allow more home/lock screen customizations. Widgets sure would be nice but not at the cost of slowing my phone down like it does in Android.

Apps; Winner: 2-way tie
WebOS cannot complete here. Both Android and iOS have >50,000 apps and at that point it just doesn’t matter. There will probably be an app for just about everything. I would actually call this one a slight win for Android just because you can still install apps outside of the marketplace and the web store they have announced should be a huge success. Oh ya, and that whole Apple approval process is a joke.

Web Browsing; Winner: 3-way tie
They are all based on webKit so what does it matter. Some will scroll faster than others and some have better resolutions, but that all depends on the phone and doesn’t matter for rendering. Android and webOS may have slight wins over iOS because they have embraced Adobe flash but once again, that is a phone specific thing because the device has to be up-to-snuff for playing flash content. A three way tie.

Gaming; Winner: 2-way tie
Android doesn’t even have a language that enables the rich games that iOS and webOS allow. And besides the quantity, webOS has every bit of the quality as iOS so it is a tie.

Music Player; Winner: 2-way tie
Android’s built in music player is terrible, iOS’ is as good as any iPod’s (which doesn’t really say much), and webOS’ is just OK. The fact that webOS’ player is open source makes the player really stand out from the crowd when you install simple things like lyrics, and wikipedia searches straight from the player. I know there are better 3rd party players on all the platforms but that is not what we are comparing here. So it is a tie between stock iOS and stock webOS.

Free Turn-by-Turn Navigation; Winner: Android
This is a killer feature, but lets be honest, this will probably come to iOS and webOS simply because Google can sell more ads if it exists on all the platforms. For right now though, it is a win for Android.

Google Apps Integration; Winner: Android
This is like saying iOS has the best iTunes integration. OF COURSE ANDROID IS INTEGRATED WITH GOOGLE APPS. If Android did not have the best app for Gmail I think we would all be very worried. This is one of those arguments that fluffs Androids numbers IMO, but I will leave it in just for the sake of argument. Every mobile OS will integrate with their own offerings, the problem is, Apple and Palm don’t have email or web app offerings. This is more a win for Google and less of a win for Android.

Google Voice; Winner: 2-way tie
Yes this is a cool feature, I have it (and have had it since it was Grand Central) but I never use it because it is iffy and I don’t think the service is quite there yet. In any case, both Android and webOS have native apps for Google Voice and iOS is stuck using a web page. Android integrates deeper into the system, but all of the basic features/settings can be set on either platform so it is a tie.

So what is that total again? This time taking out the frivolous comparisons.
iOS = 8
Android = 10
webOS = 13

Do I own a iPhone, Android phone, or Palm device? No. I have a 4 year old Windows Mobile device (HTC Vogue) running Android 2.1. I have used plenty of iPhones and have convinced quite a few people to buy webOS devices. I just needed to let the few people who read this site know webOS is the best mobile operating system currently available on the market. I just hope other technology sites can finally recognize how great webOS is, and maybe stop focusing on flaws with a phone that came out when the original iPhone was still big news.

You can read Rothgar’s original post on his blog and follow @rothgar on Twitter.

On Monday, Apple officially unveiled the iPhone 4. After playing around with it for 20 minutes or so after the keynote, I can safely say that it’s the most impressive mobile device I’ve ever seen. But plenty of people (many of which have never used the phone) disagree. Their arguments are mainly predicated on what Apple didn’t include rather than what it did.

But what those people fail to understand is that this is exactly what makes the new iPhone (as well as the previous iterations) so solid.

During his keynote address on Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that while Apple may not be the first to release features, they do so in a way that’s the best implementation.

Many people view this as absolute bullshit. But what that implies is that they think Apple simply cannot get features done in time — or that they will not do them for some reason. I have a hard time believing either of those is the case.

Jobs cited the iPhone’s cut, copy, & paste functionality as one example of Apple getting a feature right. I have to agree. For two years, everyone complained (myself included) that Apple didn’t have this functionality. Could Apple have done it sooner? Of course. But would it have been half-baked? Probably. Just look at how it works on other devices — or maybe I should say: look at how poorly it works on other devices compared to the iPhone. Most Android phones want you to use that damn ball to select text. Or worse, those arrow buttons at the bottom of the EVO’s horrid keyboard. It’s a nightmare.

Another popular example is background tasks (or multitasking). This feature is finally coming to the new iOS 4 after being on other devices for a few years. So was Apple dragging its feet out of incompetence? Or were they being stubborn? In their view, they were waiting to perfect the system that would not destroy battery life. Android’s background method is supposedly similar to what Apple will use, but it has issues (see: the EVO).

Most people haven’t yet seen third-party apps running in the background with iOS, so it’s hard to know exactly how well Apple has done here. (And I only got to play around with one app, Pandora, running in the background for a few minutes.) But a few developers I’ve talked to who have used the system say it’s by far the best combination of functionality and battery-saving techniques that they’ve seen. One told me that it basically doesn’t ding battery life at all.

In March of last year, I reported that I had heard from sources that Apple was talking about ways to bring background tasks to the iPhone. Even though it didn’t happen until now, by multiple accounts, Apple was working on it at the time. It’s just that it took Apple this long to perfect the system.

Most companies, seeing their competitors already doing something, would feel forced into releasing their own solution as quickly as possible. Not Apple. And I suspect this ends up being a big benefit for the users.

But those are things that currently now work on the iPhone or will soon be working. What about newer features that Apple left out of iPhone 4 (and iOS 4)? Here’s a list of 10 things from eWeek. Some are ridiculous (for the millionth time: Apple is not going to do a physical keyboard — nor should they), and some are just clearly (and sadly) not going to happen (Google Voice). But a few are things that come up somewhat regularly.

One is 4G support. The main problem here is that the iPhone is still exclusively tied to AT&T in the U.S., and AT&T has basically no 4G support yet (they have enough problems with their 3G support). If Apple made a version of the iPhone that worked on Sprint’s network (which recently rolled out the EVO 4G), then maybe we could talk — but they don’t.

More importantly, I’m not even sure we’ll see a 4G-capable iPhone next year. As Apple proved with the first iPhone (which wasn’t 3G despite 3G being fairly ubiquitous at the time), they care more about the overall experience than about being the first to have a nice-sounding feature. Users laughed at the notion that 3G capabilities severely dinged battery life — until the iPhone 3G came out and that’s exactly what happened.

With 4G, by all accounts, the battery ding is even worse. Also, 4G is still slowly deploying around the country, and some carriers (read: AT&T) won’t have it really deployed for a long, long time. In other words, don’t be surprised if next year Apple still doesn’t have a 4G version of the device. Everyone will bitch about it, but in Apple’s view, it likely just won’t be worth it yet.

Another feature brought up is over-the-air (OTA) updates. While eWeek seems to specifically be talking about OTA firmware updates (does anyone really care about that so much?), the more pressing issue is the ability to sync things wirelessly on your iPhone. Currently, you can only truly do that with certain MobileMe elements (like Calendar, Contacts, etc). But in his post a couple days ago, my colleague Jason Kincaid brought up his disappointment that over-the-air syncing of things like apps and music wasn’t in iOS yet.

This is a fair point both because it would be very useful, and because it’s baked into the latest version of Android, 2.2. But we have yet to see exactly how well this system with work with Android 2.2. The on-stage demos at Google I/O were impressive, but it probably wouldn’t have been made into a demo if it weren’t. The proof will be in the real-world usage of this feature.

Apple is clearly thinking about how best to do this as well. Jobs said as much during the D Conference a few weeks ago, and Apple has even blocked applications that do something similar (a sign that they’re likely working on it — and that they don’t want third parties touching the iTunes/iPhone sync interaction). Make no mistake: this feature will be coming to the iPhone. And I would bet it will be here next year. And if Apple is able to get its iTunes-in-the-cloud service off the ground in time, it could be a lot easier than people are thinking right now.

The point to all of this is that one of the things that makes the iPhone great is that Apple is so deliberate and meticulous in the features they choose to focus on and implement. Could Apple include more features? Of course. But anytime you try to do more, you take focus away from the key things you want to get done. It’s something that’s so obvious it almost needs to be restated.

It’s the same reason why startups that focus on creating as many features as possible often fare worse than those that focus on a few key ideas. The ones that keep it simple are able to execute much better. Apple (which likes to think of itself as the “world’s biggest startup”) is no different, and the iPhone is a testament to that.

The conspiracy theorists will say that Apple holds back features to be able to sell more devices the next time around. I believe it’s much less about that, and more about focusing on a core group of features that matter the most — and nailing them. Judging by both sales figures and customer satisfaction reports, the strategy is working. And the iPhone 4 — even without 4G, OTA updates, a physical keyboard, etc, etc, etc — will prove that once again.

HTC’s Evo might be the last phone running custom software on top of Android that you should even consider buying. Because the whole trend of skinning Android has become a horrible, dividing mess.

The problem with an Android phone running a phone manufacturer’s homebrew software, like HTC’s Sense or Sony’s TimeScape, is well known: You’re going to wait a lot longer to get the freshest version of Android. That wait wasn’t a big deal in the past. And considering Android’s grander ambitions, I’m not so sure fragmentation is as big of an issue as some would suggest (which Google will tell you). But as of Android 2.2, you should still think a bit more deeply about which Android path you’re going to walk down.

The Problem with Custom Skins

They’re awful. HTC’s Sense interface was widely regarded for making Android better when it showed up on the Hero a year ago. Well, Sense is the exception, not the rule. Some truly hideous atrocities have been committed in the name of Android, like Samsung’s Behold II. Not every skin is quite that offensive, but even what I’d consider the average, like Sony’s interface for the Xperia X10, is cloying and confusing; with the Evo, even Sense started to feel a bit tacky. The point should be to make Android sexier and easier to use. They don’t.

Android’s caught up. As of Android 2.2 Froyo, there is basically nothing any of the custom interfaces do that Android doesn’t. A year ago, Android lacked a great many things, from social networking powers to decent Exchange support to remotely accessible settings. HTC’s Sense filled in those massive gaps, once upon a time. But now Android juggles multiple calendars, smoothly integrates Facebook and Twitter into contacts (more seamlessly than any of the custom skins), lets you quickly access settings from the home screen, and even has built-in Wi-Fi hotspot powers. At this point, none of the custom software builds add killer features anymore.

They’re too slow. A corollary of the above point: Not so long ago, Android was behind the best of the custom interfaces. But now, Android is evolving so quickly, it not only caught up, it’s zooming past those meddling with its software. Frankly, the custom interfaces need to innovate faster to make themselves worthwhile—as it is, it seems pretty likely that the next stock version of Android build will be superior to anything phone makers can offer (in fact, I would argue that 2.2 is already). But think about it: How likely is it that hardware companies are going to be able to keep up with Google, who finally seems to have hit its stride with Android?

The reasons to buy an Android phone with customized software have effectively dissolved. They don’t look better; they don’t work better; and they’ll hold you back from getting the latest and greatest updates from Google, possibly by many months. Most people don’t care or even know that their phone really is a computer, meaning it can actually get better via the magic of software updates. But if you’re reading this, you probably care. Android 2.2 is a markedly more excellent experience than 2.1. The best stuff at this point seems like it’ll come from Google, so riding the bleeding edge of Android is the place to be, more now than ever.

Maybe that’ll change in another year, if Google slows down their release cycle as drastically as Android chief Andy Rubin says, to just once or twice a year. Which will be kind of a sad moment when it arrives—the thrill of Android, at least for geeks, is how fast it’s moving. But that’s when it’ll be safe to jump on the slow road. Until then, I’ll be sticking with the official, (probably) annually released Google phones.

Recent  Apple keynote was, I think more than ever, a testament to Steve Jobs’s presentation skills. Faced with an audience that had already seen the grand finale, he still had no trouble evoking plenty of gleeful gasps and applause. He even managed to make the now-infamous Wifi glitch amusing and entertaining (if a bit odd), rather than painfully awkward.

But despite all of his showmanship and a very impressive new product, the keynote wasn’t quite the game changer that I expected. I don’t mean to say I found the iPhone 4 to be disappointing — it will be incredibly successful, and many of my friends are champing at the bit to get one. But I expected to walk out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center yesterday longing for the next iPhone despite my current allegiance to Android. That didn’t happen.

A few weeks ago, an Apple zealot emailed Steve Jobs asking him if Apple had any WWDC announcements that would “blow [Google] out of the water”.  Jobs responded, “you won’t be disappointed.”  To me, it sounded like Jobs was hinting at something major — a feature or service or device that was simply so much better than Android that it would feel like the G1 vs. iPhone 3G days all over again, when the iPhone was vastly superior.  But instead of launching a nuke, Apple’s announcements were a strong but survivable offensive against Android; a retaliation for the recent attacks at Google I/O. Apple has taken the lead once again, but I don’t think Android will be playing catchup for long.

Before I go any further, I think I should explain where I’m coming from so as to cast aside (or perhaps, affirm) any suspicion that I’m simply an Android fanboy. I used an iPhone full-time for two years, first with the original iPhone, and then the iPhone 3G. I loved both of them, and for a long time held a rather naive view that Apple couldn’t do much wrong. Then, in mid-2009, Apple started blocking Google’s applications and I began to have serious misgivings about the App Store. A few months later I switched to a Droid, and then to a Nexus One, which I’ve been using for around five months now. Despite my issues with the App Store, I bought an iPad the day it came out and was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying it was “changing the paradigm of how we will use computers” (a ridiculously clichéd choice of words, but I still agree with them). Of course, my decision to buy an iPad may indicate that I’m a huge hypocrite, but I like to tell myself that I just have a nuanced perspective.

All of that said, let’s get down to business.

The Device

It’s been said many times already, but it’s worth repeating: this thing is gorgeous. It unapologetically abandons the older iPhone’s curves in favor of more defined edges that make the thing just look inherently powerful. And, perhaps more important, it feels rock solid.

One of the first questions I posed to the Apple sentry stationed next to my demo unit was how resistant the new model was to scratches and falls. His response: “the screen is stronger than sapphire”. A quizzical expression later (I know nothing about gemstones), he explained that this meant it was really strong and would be very difficult to crack. After holding the satisfyingly weighty device for a few minutes, I honestly got the impression that I could throw it against the wall and that it would survive intact (the sentry did not like this idea). I really haven’t seen an Android phone that felt this sturdy or looked this good.

Aside from the build quality, the most striking feature of the iPhone 4 is undoubtedly its screen. It’s sharper than your computer monitor. Reading text on it feels a little surreal, like it is almost too crisp because you’re not used to seeing this kind of display on a phone (a nice problem to have). Again, this blows the screens I’ve seen on Android phones out of the water. If I had to guess, I’d say the Motorola Droid comes closest, but doesn’t match it.

One related note on this: switching between the iPhone 4 and original iPhone screen is a little jarring — as Steve Jobs said on stage, once you’ve tried the “Retina Display”, you can’t really go back. Unfortunately, the iPad features a display that is most decidedly not the Retina Display (in fact, it has a lower pixel density than the older iPhone models). In other words, your shiny new iPhone 4 is going to make your 2 month old iPad feel obsolete real fast.

iOS 4

Amid all of the announcements yesterday, I think I was most surprised by the lack of news around iOS 4, which made its debut in April and will be released later this month. Granted, this is a huge update, bringing multitasking, threaded conversations in mail, folders, and plenty of other goodies to the iPhone. Thing is, Android already does most of this — I had expected a major feature or two that we hadn’t heard about yet.

Multitasking is clearly the big news here, and yes, there is an argument that the iPhone may be able to get better battery life than Android in this regard. But my Nexus One typically makes it all day without having battery issues, and the ‘rogue application’ phenomenon simply hasn’t been a major problem for me (I think it’s affected me twice). And the iPhone still has a a lousy notification system, which I don’t think is as usable as Android’s slide-down tray.  In short, this just seems like a matter of preference.

FaceTime

This is the wildcard for me. Apple’s execution here is good — you don’t need to deal with user accounts or setup of any kind, which is very nice. But it’s not perfect. The biggest issue here is that it’s Wifi only, which is going to be pretty restrictive. Apple’s marketing videos around this feature are truly touching, but ensuring that those heartwarming moments happen within Wifi range is going to be tough (not to mention that you’ll need to make sure your loved ones are all equipped with the newest iPhone).

Of course, this will change in time — carriers will eventually be able to accomodate the increased video traffic, and obviously the market penetration of the iPhone 4 will be increasing quickly. But that will also give Android plenty of time to catch up, especially given that Apple is making FaceTime an open standard (though the logistics of this haven’t been publicized yet).

My hunch is that FaceTime will be a major marketing win for Apple and that it will keep going strong with those heartstring-tugging ads. But I’m less sure that people will actually be using the feature regularly in the immediate future.

Other Software

A significant amount of time during yesterday’s keynote was dedicated to showing off iPhone applications. I don’t think any of these will have a major impact on the success of either platform, but they’re worth going over.

Zynga’s Farmville

• This is going to be an absolutely huge draw for millions of Farmville addicts. That said, my hunch is that the demographics for Zynga games are more in line with the iPhone than with Android to begin with. If you really wanted to, you can likely get Farmville working using Android’s Flash support.

iMovie for iPhone

• This is the kind of application that Android simply doesn’t have yet (or at least, I can’t find): polished and powerful. Given how terrible the stock Android media player is I don’t have high hopes for this sort of thing coming from Google, so we’ll probably have to wait for third parties to develop something comparable.

iBooks

• Jobs spent a lot of time talking about iBooks, namely its ability to now read PDFs and to sync between multiple devices. Note that Amazon’s Kindle app is coming to Android this summer and will feature similar syncing capabilities.

Outlook

After handling the new iPhone, there’s little doubt in my mind that my Nexus One is no longer the state of the art. The screen isn’t nearly as sharp as the iPhone 4, the build quality isn’t as good, and I don’t have a front facing camera for video chat. Most of these shortcomings hold true for other popular Android devices like the Incredible and Evo 4G (though the latter does have the front camera).

But despite the fact that my phone doesn’t quite match up to the iPhone 4, at no point yesterday did I consider jumping back onto the iPhone bandwagon. My Nexus One doesn’t feel much slower than the iPhone (especially since upgrading to Froyo). I can’t see myself using the phone video chat in the immediate feature, especially given the Wifi limitation and the fact that I’d only be able to use it with other technophiles initially. And while the iPhone 4?s screen is pretty damn amazing, it isn’t nearly sharp enough to overcome my disdain for AT&T.

What’s more, I’ll be surprised if Android devices don’t surpass the iPhone’s hardware capabilities within the next four months or so. We’ll probably be seeing sharper screens, faster processors, and even integrated gyroscopes (another feature launching with the iPhone 4) on the next wave of devices. And from a software perspective, Android actually seems poised to start beating Apple on some fronts, namely its connection with cloud services. Despite rumors leading up to WWDC, Steve Jobs didn’t once bring up Apple’s MobileMe cloud service during his keynote. During his interview at the D8 conference he said that Apple was working on wireless tethering/sync features, but it seems like Google has a head start.

In short, more than ever it looks like Android and Apple are in a dead heat. And that’s a great thing for all of us. Even you fanboys who didn’t read this far.

You know that scene in Iron Man 2, where Justin Hammer asks Rhodey which weapons he wants inside War Machine—and Rhodey says “all of them”? That’s exactly how the Evo 4G was born. Somebody said “everything.”

The Evo comes out tomorrow (6/4) on Sprint for $200 with 2-year contract rebate.

4.3-inch, 800 x 480-pixel screen. 4G WiMax with wireless hotspot powers. 8-megapixel, 720p video camera. Front-facing camera for video chat. 1GHz processor. HDMI out. Kickstand. The Evo’s dossier reads like a phone nerd’s sticky back-of-napkin fantasy, which is precisely the point. The Evo is an icon, manufacturer HTC gleefully tugging at customers’ hems: Look what we can do!

The Evo a beautiful slab. Being the biggest, fastest and strongest—and boastfully so—is a rare trait, marginalized by the Apple-born-but-increasingly-popular mantra that guts don’t matter, or at least that you shouldn’t talk about them; that the experience should come out of a magical black box. The Evo is HTC’s response to that. It’s pure guts.

This Is a Big Phone

You will either love how ridiculously palm-spanning a phone that is well over four inches diagonally feels—or you will find it awkward and kind of silly.

This is exactly how we’re split on it. Jason really adores the size, yet he is a power nerd. I think it feels like a weirdly retrograde idea of the future, what some people expected smartphones would evolve into before the iPad entered into our collective consciousness—a mutant phone/tablet thing that’s just big enough to do everything. It’s just a really big phone that will polarize the buying public.

I mean, when there’s a kickstand, a statement is being made.

It’s heavy, too, almost in the way you’d expect an armored suit to be. The way it’s sculpted—aggressively functional, like War Machine, with little Tony Stark flash—emphasizes unseasoned power. You might expect the back of the phone to be cut from metal, but it’s fit with a rubber-esque finish. (We are still talking about HTC here.)

The build quality is nonetheless respectable, down to the kickstand—it’ll survive a tumble or three. (There is light leaking through the seam where the top of phone meets the frame, netting a few demerits.)

Given that the camera lens protrudes from the back of the phone, don’t expect it to hold up as well. It will be scratched and scuffed within a week.

The screen makes you gasp a little when you turn it on and it glows for the first time. As it lights up, the enormity suddenly becomes tangible; you’re struck by the brilliance of the screen itself. It’s not just big, it’s super bright and colorful, with a pleasantly wide viewing angle. (Crucial for kickstand video watching.) Since it’s a regular LCD it’s actually usable in the sun, not the more fashionable AMOLED, seen in the Nexus One, Droid Incredible and Zune HD. But it’s not tremendously better than an iPhone’s screen, either.

What makes the experience of the 4.3-inch screen transformative is that it gives you breathing room. Twitter feeds feel less cramped. Web pages are roomier, so there’s less panning and zooming. It’s ridiculously easy to type when the keyboard is so large. Videos are just big enough that—what do you know—a kickstand doesn’t seem absurd. After a while, the Evo’s screen doesn’t seem that big—it’s just that other cellphone screens feel small.

If only the battery was a fuel cell, powered by ambition. It might be up to the task of powering this juggernaut.

My main phone at the moment is a Nexus One, so I’m pretty familiar with managing Android to make it through the day. It’s oddly a struggle to make the Evo last that long—on a weekend, I had to recharge by 2pm—and I had 4G turned off. Expect to plug this thing in at work before you go out at night if you want a phone that isn’t dead by your second drink.

Super Speed Data

Everything you’ve read makes the Evo sound like yet another HTC Android phone, albeit on a grander scale. What makes it a phone truly worth considering is that it runs on Sprint’s 4G WiMax network (which unavoidably adds $10 to every plan, whether or not you live where you can take advantage of it), accessing the web with speeds comprable with those of low-end home broadband.

Additional, the Evo can serve as a wireless hotspot, allowing “up to eight” of your devices to utilize the network just like they would Wi-Fi at home—if you pay another $30 a month. ($70-a-month for data may sound expensive, but realize that Sprint’s OverDrive 4G hotspot runs $60 a month, and all it does is deliver internet.)

What’s all this mean in real life? It’s really freaking fast—browsing the web is faster than any cellphone you’ve ever used—but only if your city has the 4G infrastructure. (Sprint has a list of 4G cities.)

Testing the Evo in Wimax-equipped Chicago, pages just load. Thunk. Mobile sites pop up near-instantaneously. Full versions of the same sites load with an expeditiousness that challenges even the most nasally impatience. If you didn’t tell a friend using the phone that it had 4G, they’d probably assume you were connected to Wi-Fi. Even face-to-face video chat over Fring runs close to perfectly (while in 3G mode the results are more mixed, with lag ranging from minimal to vastly annoying). And the generalized page load time improvement between 3G and 4G is something you’ll cherish without a stopwatch, but we timed the speed improvement anyway. (Oh, if only it was running the more nible Android 2.2underneath.)

In terms of clocked bandwidth, the Evo approaches DSL. That’s not cable internet, no, and it falls a bit short of advertised speeds (for me, at least). But it’s a far cry from what your phone is using now. We charted the results below in which the Evo averages download speeds of over 3Mbps (that’s 384KB/s).

As a hotspot, I was only able to connect two devices: a laptop and an iPad. While the Evo promises support for 8 connect devices, I couldn’t break this 2 limit no matter how many times or other devices I tried. However, what I could do on those two connections felt like a tiny miracle.

After I browsed the web on both systems without hiccups, I pushed the threshold. On the iPad, I decided to stream Netflix, while on the laptop, I opened AIM, my Twitter client, Gmail/Chat and streamed Hulu in HD. I even video called Jason on the Evo. To my surprise, I was able to pull off the stunt with near-sustainability. (Every 10 minutes or so, Netflix did stutter a bit.)

I’m actually willing to conclude that an average person could really use the Evo on Wimax as their primary home connection, if they have good WiMax reception, sharing it with a spouse for casual browsing and video—especially as the 4G data plan is unlimited. Torrent freaks, well, you know I’m not talking to you.

But maybe the most impressive thing of all about 4G on the Evo was its hotspot battery life. While I expected 2-3 hours of runtime (given that the battery barely typically doesn’t last a day of normal usage as just a phone), the Evo cracked 4 hours under heavy use (nonstop video streams, AIM, Twitter and Gmail/Chat by the two devices mentioned above). Plugged in, it could obviously run forever (which is how we powered through Google IO, albeit with Sprint’s also excellent 3G service).

While I’m obviously nuts about 4G, I do want to share one caveat you should keep in mind: Given the hype for Verizon and AT&T’s incoming LTE networks, most people might think of4G technologies as 700Mhz tech—low frequency waves that reach farther and penetrate buildings more easily than what cell carriers use now for phones. Sprint’s 4G network sits on a much higher frequency—2.5GHz, which offers superior bandwidth over lower frequency spectrum, but it’s not as great at penetrating buildings. In my practical testing, that meant 4G cut out deep inside buildings—and forget elevators. Indeed, I tested one particular spot downtown where I can always get Sprint 3G reception even though my AT&T iPhone totally craps out. Checking that same spot with the Evo, 4G fared as poorly as AT&T’s 3G. At my apartment, I get a full strength signal by the window. Move a room in, I lose a bar. There’s less flexibility here than you’d expect.

So is Sprint’s 4G on the Evo the Holy Grail of wireless internet service? Not quite. But boy does it come close.

The Shooter

The camera is both impressive and disappointing, but it’s no point and shoot replacement. In straight up daylight, the 8 megapixel camera takes what most people would consider to be fantastic photos for a phone. It’s really fast to focus and shoot, which is critical for a decent phone camera. And HTC’s custom camera interface is nicer, easier to use and more fine-grained than what Google offered in Android pre-2.2.

But once the light conditions shift toward the darker side of the spectrum, it’s a crapshoot. While it struggles in lowlight, and the accompanying dual LED flash will blind your subjects, washing out their complexions like a solar flare. (Seriously, the flash is so painful in a bar that it could double as some sort of non-lethal defensive device.)

The 720p video is disappointing in any light—it totally sucks. It’s grainy, blotchy and just plain crap. (You can check out HD samples, along with photos in full resolution on Flickr, by clicking on the gallery above.)

Video out of the 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera surprisingly ain’t too shabby, so our video phone calls from the future using Fring went even better than we expected.

Knocking Some Sense Into Android

Like the Incredible on Verizon—a phone that now seems more like a mini Evo—the Evo is running HTC’s custom Sense interface on top of Android 2.1, which we’ve covered extensively. It’s basically the same as its ever been, making some things better, and some things worse. The Evo’s display size works against the interface a bit, making the glossy plastic, carbon and neon green interface feel cheaper than it ever has. Some the icons and gradients just look bad as a result, too. (Admittedly we’re a bit spoiled by Android 2.2, which now does everything Sense had to before, like better Exchange support, wireless hotspot powers, and integrated social networking.)

The bigger issue to consider, though, as it is with every Android phone running a custom interface, is how badly you want to be on the bleeding edge of the Android platform. You will wait several months for Android 2.2 to reach the Evo, which offers a ton of tangible benefits, not the least of which is seriously improved speed (you’ll notice mostly within apps). And you’ll wait again for Android 2.3, and so on. For most people, this won’t be a problem—but it’s something to be aware of, particularly since you won’t have the option of the official Google phone, the Nexus One, on Sprint.

Pricing

The upfront cost isn’t the painful part: It’s the maintenance costs, and the monthly pricing for the Evo seems just about as expensive. After paying $200 (post- $100 mail-in rebate) It costs $10 a month for premium data—which isn’t optional, even if you live nowhere near WiMax, but it is UNLIMITED—on top of one of these mandatory plans listed below (the big “but” is that these plans include unlimited text messages, saving you $20 over a comparable plan on AT&T.)

Individual
$69.99 per month/450 anytime minutes + Any Mobile, Anytime
$89.99 per month/900 anytime minutes + Any Mobile, Anytime
$99.99 per month/unlimited minutes

Family
$129.99 per month/1500 anytime minutes shared between two lines + Any Mobile, Anytime
$169.99 per month/3000 anytime minutes shared between two lines + Any Mobile Anytime
$189.98 per month/unlimited minutes

Plus, it’s another $30 a month to use the Mobile Hotspot feature, per phone. It’s a fat wallet commitment. But at the same time, it’s far and away the best value for data that any carrier is offering. $70 a month gets you unlimited data and tethering on a network actually worth using, especially if you can get on WiMax. AT&T wants $45 for the privilege of tethering with a 2GB pool of data that I’d be lucky to even have a good enough connection to get through in New York or San Francisco.

Verdict

The calculus for deciding if you want this phone is relatively simple: If you want the biggest, brawniest, most ridiculously muscular phone you can buy, it’s the Evo. Just don’t forget to top off the power before going into work.

WiMax, in a phone! Weeeeeeeeeee.

A beautiful screen that’s the size of a rugby field

Sprint’s 3G network

An unabashed celebration of steroidal specs

The camera’s great…in daylight

It’s massive, like a squished carbon fiber brick

Miserable battery life

You’re gonna wait a long time for fresh Android updates