I have both phones on my desk (along with a few dozen others) since I have to develop and test for them. I decided not to wait for the SGS3 and just buy the EVO LTE for my personal phone.
On day 14, when the return-it-or-live-with-it alarm went off, I returned the EVO LTE and got my money back. These are my experiences. They may help you, they may not. Not all EVO LTE users are experiencing the same problems. Just be sure you beat the heck out of any phone during the 14-day trial to see if you have any of the same.
1) Hardware. Thanks to Qualcomm, there's only one CDMA/LTE radio chip on earth. Sprint and VZW are both stuck with it. Thanks to that one chip and its required drivers, there's only one multicore CPU that it works with -- Qualcomm's Krait processor. Both the EVO LTE and the SGS3 are variants of Qualcomm's reference platform:
AnandTech - Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (Krait) Performance Preview - 1.5 GHz MSM8960 MDP and Adreno 225 Benchmarks
That's why GS3 users on Sprint and VZW don't get the quad-core Samsung CPU. However, the Krait actually beats the Samsung CPU in several benchmarks, so it's not a bad choice.
Thanks to the CPU, radio, and associated drivers, there isn't a wide variety of multi-function radio chipsets (bluetooth, wifi, and GPS) left to choose from to fill in the rest of the motherboard.
Honestly, there's only a nickel's worth of difference between these two phones' guts. That nickel, by the way, goes to Dr. Dre for the sound chip in the HTC. Otherwise, they're stuck with the same CPU, GPU, and multi-radio chipsets. I'm not sure where all the complaints about signal really come from. It's probably just down to how the antennas are routed in the cases, and the local deployment of carrier towers. Both forums are riddled with anecdotal evidence that both phones have terrible radios.
I seem to have the opposite experience from other forum posters. Samsung phones never gave me any radio trouble, HTCs have. Those of you who love the radios in your HTC, more power to you.
Beyond the guts, there are differences in the displays and the camera that you may or may not notice. I think the HTC had a nicer display, and better camera software.
The HTC seems to get higher benchmark scores than the SGS3. It's debatable whether or not you'll actually see a performance difference running real-life applications, especially since all or nearly all of them depend on the network. Sense (see below) will water down the user experience to the point that benchmark differences are meaningless.
2) Sense. There are a lot of folks who like Sense. I can respect that. The debate is a matter of taste. What's not a matter of taste is that Sense re-loads itself every time a memory-hogging app exits. What's not a matter of taste is that Sense is really, really aggressive at killing background tasks. Don't try to connect to a MS Lync server, for example, and expect to pretend you're at work when you're not. You'll disconnect in the background. What's not a matter of taste is that Sense is laggy, crash-prone, and chock full of widgets and processes that love to update themselves in the background.
Again, plenty of users never report seeing any of these problems with Sense, and like it a lot. It really depends on how you configure it, what widgets are running all the time, and what your favorite apps are doing in the background. Beat the hell out of it during that trial window to see if it happens to you.
3) Memory. Both the SGS3 and the EVO LTE have an odd partition of their memory. Part phone, part internal storage, and part mounted as a pretend external SD card. Plug in a real SD card, and it mounts as sdcard2. The SGS3 at least allocates more memory as phone memory (2Gb vs. 1Gb). Add the smaller phone allocation to the memory- and network-hogging widgets, and you get some idea of why Sense is such a beast, and why it has to kill background tasks so aggressively.
4) Battery. EVO's is glued in, SGS3's is removable. Both get unbelievably hot, especially when using GPS.
So, I knew all of the above when I bought the EVO, so why'd I go with it? Because the differences are trivial, livable, and mostly a matter of taste. I decided not to wait a month and just jump on the EVO.
So, why'd I return it? The EVO's GPS didn't work. At all. It couldn't go more than about 4 minutes without the phone overheating and losing GPS signal. Now, this could just be a sample defect and not a problem with all EVOs. But the store would not reset the 14-day clock if I exchanged it. I'm not going to spend the rest of my contract trying to find the one example that works. I'm better off getting my money back now, and trying again when the SGS3 lands in stores.
My decision to return the phone was determined more by the store's policy than any glaring defect in the EVO LTE itself. If the GPS worked, I probably could have lived with Sense and the glued-in battery. Or at least it would have taken me more than 14 days to decide that I absolutely hated them.
There is one other LTE option: The Galaxy Nexus. It's a really nice phone, even though it has slightly inferior hardware and no SD card slot. The lack of Sense maladies makes it feel just as responsive even with a slightly slower CPU. Since the perception of performance is almost always a matter of the network, I would go with the GNex if you hate both TouchWiz and Sense. I don't think you'll be unhappy with the results.
(Please don't chime in with the LG Viper as an LTE option. The LG Viper is a turd. If you can't afford any other phone, then save your money until you can.)
I don't hate TouchWiz, so I'm going to go out and try to pick up a 32Gb SGS3. We'll see.
--Qfg
EDIT: I forgot to add, Google Wallet doesn't work on the EVO, nor does it come with the $25 credit if it did work. Take that for what it's worth.
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