Sprint just went live with their HTC EVO 4G in New York City, and there’s one juicy detail that we hadn’t caught wind of until today. The EVO will be the first US smartphone to do true-blue video calling, thanks to Sprint’s launch partner Qik. We had known about the forward-facing camera on the HTC EVO 4G for some time, but we had no idea that Sprint was looking to use it to do real video calling.
Qik was on hand at the Sprint EVO 4G event to tell us a little about the EVO’s exclusive video calling feature and to demonstrate the video calling app’s relatively low lag times. As you can see from the video, the lag between the two EVO’s conducting the video chat is as low as we could hope for.
What’s more, the Qik app can make use of either the front-facing or the rear-facing camera. That means you can video chat with a friend in a two-way face-to-face conversation, or you can simply show your friend what’s happening on the other side of your EVO 4G. Now that’s a really cool feature.
All in all, the video chat feature is a big selling point for the EVO 4G – on top of the massive 4.3-inch touchscreen, the 8-megapixel camera, HDMI video output, and HD 720p video recording.
Make sure to check out all our HTC EVO 4G hands-on coverage here and here and here.