Updated 06/04 to include details of HTC's software fix for the bug.
The timing couldn't be worse: As Sprint's highly-anticipated 4G smartphone gets ready to go on sale, a glitch involving the phone's storage media has cropped up.
A problem with the 8-GB MicroSD card that ships with the HTC Evo has left some early users frustrated. Some people who tried to take photos using the phone's camera got error messages saying the device cannot save files to the SD card "due to insufficient file permissions." Others found that the gadget could not access the SD card at all. Gadget Lab experienced it when testing the phone's otherwise impressive camera.
The Android-based HTC Evo is the first 4G smartphone to hit the market. Google gave about 5,000 of the devices to attendees at its developer conference two weeks ago.
"It seems to be fairly widespread among those who received the phones," says Andy Y, an Evo user who has been in touch with Google and HTC tech support over his faulty Evo SD card. "It's a troubling trend." He has posted extensively on an online Android forum about his experience, where he says about 20 people have complained of similar problems.
HTC spokesperson Keith Nowak acknowledged the issue.
"We have seen this crop up intermittently in some of the Evo 4G devices," Nowak told Wired.com. "We have identified the cause, are testing a solution and expect to have a software solution available very shortly that will be automatically pushed to phones over the air.
"Many users are finding that a power cycle or switching the card out seems to rectify the issue, in most cases," he says.
A Sprint spokeswoman says Sprint is aware of the issue but it is "impacting few of the devices." The HTC Evo phones distributed at the Google conference are from the same shipment that Sprint will be selling in the next few weeks, says the spokeswoman.
On Friday morning, HTC, started pushing out over-the-air wireless updates that would fix the problem for current and new users lining up to buy the device.
It's a troubling complication for HTC and Sprint as thousands of Evo phones will go on sale this weekend.
HTC and Sprint unveiled the Evo in May. The feature-packed gadget has a huge 4.3-inch touchscreen, 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video conferencing and a 8-megapixel camera for shooting photos and videos. (Evo's MicroSD card has been manufactured by SanDisk.) Evo runs the 2.1 version of the Android operating system, and costs $200 with a two-year contract. Despite poor battery life, the phone has gathered positive reviews.
Neil Lund, one of the attendees at the conference and editor of droidninja.com, says he faced the camera problem the day he started using his Evo phone.
"Some photos I had taken came up blank," he says. "I attempted to use the Astro file manager app to read from the SD card and it wasn't able to recognize it."
Lund reformatted the SD card and still came up with errors. He says a separate 2-GB MicroSD card filled with music that Google handed out to attendees worked fine on the phone.
"My hunch is that a bad lot of SD cards went out," says Andy Y, who uses the name "Bek" on the Android forum where he posts. He says he hasn't seen the card-related errors since he installed a new SD card on his phone Wednesday night.
Sprint exchanged Lund's SD card from his Evo phone "free of charge and with no hassle," he says.
However, HTC's Nowak insists its a software glitch. "All I know for sure is it is a software issue, which is why we can easily make the necessary tweaks with an OTA (over the air) update," he says.
See Also:
- Wired Video: HTC Evo 4G Dissected
- HTC EVO 4G $200, on Sale June 4
- Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top
- HTC 'Incredible' Android Phone Lands on Verizon
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
