The HTC EVO Design 4G is a great affordable smartphone for Sprint. At $99.99 with a two-year contract, it's the second 4G smartphone on Sprint to launch for less than $100, though some older 4G phones now cost less than $100 up front. But the EVO Design is a significant step up from most of those phones—it's one of the best 4G smartphones you can buy on Sprint, and the price is just a bonus.

Design and Call Quality
The Design is a black slab that measures 4.5 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.6 ounces. It's made of a mixture of black aluminum and soft-touch plastic and looks unassuming. The real focus is on the gorgeous 4-inch, 540-by-960-pixel (qHD) capacitive LCD touch screen, which looks incredibly sharp and crisp. There are four capacitive touch buttons beneath the screen. Typing on HTC's on-screen QWERTY keyboard was easy in both portrait and landscape modes, thanks to its well-tuned haptic feedback and predictive text algorithm.

The Design 4G is a CDMA/WiMAX phone that runs on Sprint's 3G and 4G networks. It's also a GSM/EDGE 2G quad-band world phone (GSM 850/900/1800/1900). There's also 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, so it'll work anywhere you want, as long as you don't mind the roaming rates. Running Ookla's Speedtest.net app, I saw 4G download speeds up to 7.5Mbps down, which is impressive. They averaged closer to 5.5Mbps, which is still very good. Like all Sprint 4G devices, the Design is capped at 1.5 Mbps for 4G uploads. The Design can be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot to provide network access to up to eight devices with the proper plan.

Reception was good, but call quality was just mediocre. Voices sound clear in the earpiece, but extremely thin, bordering on hollow. On the other end, calls made with the phone are easy to understand, with average noise cancellation, but voices sound a bit robotic. The speakerphone sounds much like the earpiece—clear but thin—and doesn't go loud enough to use outdoors. Calls sounded better over a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. Battery life was average. With 4G turned off, the phone pulled in 5 hours 41 minutes of talk time.

Performance and Apps
The phone is powered by a single-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor, which makes for solid—though strictly midrange—performance. Our benchmarks show that the Design should be ready for most common tasks, but gamers should look for something dual-core, like the Motorola Photon 4G ($199.99, 4.5 stars).

The Design is running Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), along with HTC's Sense 3.0 overlay. Sense has a great balance of extra features such as Facebook and Twitter integration in the contact book, along with some really lovely visual elements. There are seven customizable home screens that come preloaded with a bunch of different apps and widgets. There's also some undeletable bloatware, but not as much as you'll find on some other phones.

You also get all the usual Android benefits, including free, voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS navigation, excellent email capabilities, and a speedy WebKit browser. The Design shouldn't have any trouble running most of the 250,000+ third-party apps in the Android Market, provided they support the qHD screen.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The phone has a microSD card slot underneath the battery cover. HTC includes an 8GB card; my 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards also worked fine. There's also 1.05GB of free internal storage. A standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack sits on the top left edge of the phone. Music sounded fine through both wired earbuds and Altec Lansing Backbeat Bluetooth headphones ($99, 3.5 stars). I was able to play AAC, MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA audio files, but not FLAC. Video playback isn't as good. The Design played MPEG4 and H.264 videos smoothly at resolutions up to 720p, but doesn't support AVI, DivX, or XviD files.

The 5-megapixel auto-focus camera includes an LED flash and an F2.2 lens. There's also a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chats. Shutter speeds were fast, and test photos looked sharp and balanced, with accurate color detail. The camera also records 1280-by-720-pixel (720p) video. It averaged 20 frames per second and stuttered a bit; you're better off taking things down a notch to 960-by-540 pixels for better results.

Sprint is the only major carrier to offer unlimited 4G data on smartphones, which makes the HTC EVO Design 4G a very tempting proposition. The Samsung Conquer 4G ($99.99, 4 stars) has better call quality, but a lower resolution screen; I'd only recommend it over the Design if you plan to do a lot of talking. For an additional $100, the Motorola Photon is Sprint's top-of-the line super-phone. It's a world phone with a beautiful, high-res screen, like the Design, but it also has a faster processor and the ability to double as a nettop PC with the proper accessories. We haven't reviewed the iPhone 4 for Sprint ($99.99), but it features an even sharper screen than the Design, and the Apple App Store is home to more than 500,000 apps, though the phone doesn't support 4G speeds.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 41 minutes

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