[Epic 4G General] bitbang3r:
Gotta agree about that point. Samsung have historically been less than forthcoming with documentation about their very, very proprietary and undocumented hardware, but I can't really complain about their build quality. I can freely bash Samsung about their short-sighted stupidity with using mask rom instead of flash in their PalmOS phones (thus guaranteeing the SPHi300's premature obsolescence and SPHi330's untimely demise due to a fatal flaw that bricked the phone with no way to patch after manufacturing), but the build quality on my HTC PPC-6700, Touch, and Hero was absolute junk compared to the Samsung phones that came before it.

Truth be told, our biggest collective problem is Sprint -- their refusal to let us use anything besides the one or two phones they choose to bless us with at any point in time, and the stupid value-engineering compromises they ram down our throats for the sake of meeting a retail price point. Even if our practical real-world choices were limited to "any unlocked phone with a model sold by Sprint, Verizon, or US Cellular and FCC-mandated R-UIM card", we'd still have 2.5-3x the choices we do now, and fewer situations of "frustratingly close to being *almost* perfect but for $(horrid_fatal_flaw)".

Think about it... if the Evo's competition weren't just the Epic4G, but ALSO the DroidX, Incredible, and whatever Verizon's calling their Galaxy (at least, in the parts of the country where 4G isn't likely to matter in the next 12 months), I think it's safe to say that all of these phones would have been better, because they would have faced competition not only from the other phone in their carrier-customer's pair of Android phones, but from the ones nominally intended for the other carrier's customers too.

Actually, I'll go a step further... if the FCC forced Sprint and Verizon to let us buy phones with R-UIM cards and allow us to use them, the handset makers themselves would be bending over backwards at this point to make sure that any phone they sold with a "4G" module could be software-repurposed to do EITHER WiMax OR LTE, even if it DID slightly increase the manufacturing cost. Why? Because companies from China would do it if they didn't, just because they could & because it would reduce their risk of being stuck with unsold inventory that works on only a single carrier's network. With Sprint or Verizon as the ultimate customer, an Evo will never have so much as a single extra resistor that might enable it to do LTE, just because it's a quarter of a cent Sprint won't pay. Demote Sprint and Verizon to the status of "Major, major customers... but not their ONLY customers", and small enhancements that enable cross-network compatibility are a lot more likely to happen (at least, on unlocked phones not sold through the carrier. Think: same circuit board, but components omitted from "official" Sprint/Verizon models that are soldered onto carrier-agnostic unlocked models, like the ghost of a R-UIM slot hidden beneath a black adhesive patch on Sprint & Verizon PPC6700/xv6700 phones).

God forbid, if Sprint and Verizon were forced to allow it, some company from China would probably have phones capable of CDMA2000/EVDO, WiMax+LTE, UMTS, and probably legacy GSM as well, plus a R-UIM slot and a second SIM slot selling at Best Buy right now, just because it's a niche that's wide open and the carriers themselves have zero desire to accommodate.