We got some one-on-one time with the HTC EVO 4G today, and let us succinctly sum up our experience for you: wow. We’ll start with the screen… it’s gorgeous. 4.3 inches, enormous, easy to type on, responsive… it’s everything you want out of a touch screen. How’s the phones speed you ask? The product manager from HTC kept saying: “this isn’t the final software build, so there could be some lag” but to be honest, we couldn’t really find any. Opening Google Earth with 5 applications running in the background produced a tiny lag (3 seconds) but once Google Earth was up and running we were flying again.

The 1GHz Snapdragon processor really flexes its muscle in the EVO 4G. We pressed the product managers about a realistic battery life with 4G on, but all they could muster up for us was, “it’s good.” Bollocks. If you love HTC’s Sense UI, you’re really, really going to love this phone. The enhancements to Android’s UI are done with great detail and add minimal overhead to the phone’s resources (arguable, we guess). Widgets provide easy access to social media content, bookmarks, and other phone resources. You can update your “status” on several social media sites using HTC’s social widget. The EVO is a “with Google” phone and supports Exchange, Gmail, POP, and IMAP email accounts — although you can only have one Exchange account configured to the phone. We prefer having support for multiple Exchange accounts, but for most users this won’t be the end of the world.

Want more good news? The video camera is awesome. You can choose your desired resolution — we know you’re going to be keeping it in 720p — record, using either the front or rear facing camera, and upload to your favorite social media site, send via email or even transfer via Bluetooth. The quality is great and watching your videos play back on that screen is a real treat. We could go on and on about this phone but you get the idea. Great screen, very responsive, and, currently is in a class of it’s own as far as Android (and dare we say all) devices go. All Sprint and HTC will give us for a release timeline is “summer.” We’ve got June 21st circled on our calendars. Hit up the gallery for images!

UPDATE: The screen is not AMOLED as I originally wrote, I’m low on sleep.  Sorry for the confusion!

Click on over to our HTC EVO 4G gallery!

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Scoring a big win for its Google Maps and Google Earth online mapping program, Google has snagged exclusive rights to satellite imagery from the worlds highest resolution, commercial Earth-Imaging satellite. The new satellite will be able to distinguish objects on the Earth’s surface as small as 0.41-meters (16 inches) in size in B&W and 1.65 meters (5ft) in color. While the satellite will be able to collect imagery at 0.41-meters, the government requires re-sampling the imagery to half-meter resolution (why?). According to GeoEye’s press release, “the satellite will be able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond but also map the location of an object that size to within about nine feet (three meters) of its true location on the surface of the Earth without need for ground control points.” Sure hope none of you BGR readers are getting the morning paper in your skivvies when that satellite goes by! The new satellite, GeoEye-1, will be launched by GeoEye on September 4th 2008 at exactly 11:50:57 a.m. PDT (2:50:57 p.m. EDT).  A 12 story tall Delta II rocket emblazoned with Google’s image (what in the world will that look like?) will propel the satellite skyward in a launch that will be broadcast live from GeoEye’s website. After a month of calibration and testing, half meter resolution images from the satellite will be available for Google’s usage. Kudos to the first one who gets the BGR logo on these new Google Earth images!

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This one isn’t quite ready for mainstream consumption yet, but it looks pretty promising. If you’ve ever fantasized about running a version of Google Earth on your iPhone, your dreams may soon become a reality. iPhone Earth is a 3rd party application cooked up by a Colorado-based company called Earthscape. The program interacts with the iPhone’s accelerometer, allowing you to navigate through the Google Earth maps by simply tilting and contorting your handset. The program is currently in private beta, but the teaser video looks pretty promising. Now all we need is an integrated GPS receiver…

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