My HTC Evo Got Me Busted in Court

My HTC Evo, a traveling journalist’s workhorse, got me busted in open court.

It was the first day of the Xbox modding trial in Los Angeles last week, which I was covering for Wired.com. The reason wasn’t that the phone’s ringer sounded in federal court — I’ve been in too many courtrooms to make that mistake.

Blame it on my Evo’s Wi-Fi hotspot, which prompted U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez to suddenly halt proceedings in the first-of-it’s kind hacking trial.

From the bench, in the afternoon on Day No. 1 of the trial, the judge asked me to rise and state my name. After seeing my hotspot (with the perhaps-suspicious ID of “gethacked”) show up on his computer at the bench, the judge demanded to know whether I was transmitting a signal.

I pleaded guilty.

He ordered me to turn it off, but allowed me to use my MacBook Pro offline for “note taking” purposes, which came in handy the following day when Judge Gutierrez went on a 30-minute tirade bagging on the prosecution’s case, which ultimately was dismissed.

Normally, one must ask permission to use a computer from the gallery. I gambled. The payout was that I learned about one of the Evo’s few flaws: Its blazing-fast, 4G Wi-Fi hotspot cannot be made invisible. Despite that flaw, and after months using an unrooted Evo, my jailbroken iPhone seems so yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a member of the “Cult of Mac.” My Apple fanboyishness includes an iPad, a 13-inch Macbook Pro, a 27-inch iMac, and I’m a heavy iTunes software user.

But consider:

The Evo, carried by Sprint, is a phone that actually makes and receives clear calls.
I can use it as a removable storage device as easily as a USB stick.
It’s big, thick and heavy, just the way a phone should be.
It’s a data-hog of a mini computer that surfs the internet at amazing speeds.
The password-protected Wi-Fi signal it emits is killer, and it only takes the press of a button to turn it on.

In my Los Angeles hotel room, the Evo became my media hub last week.

I had a great Wi-Fi signal, thanks to the Evo, to which I attached my MacBook Pro and iPad. There was a crystal-clear Bluetooth connection to my cyborg-like phone earpiece and, again, the call quality was superb. And when I wasn’t on a call, the phone’s speaker was blaring Eminem.

James Merithew, Wired.com’s photo editor, laughed at the mug shot I took of defendant Matthew Crippen using my Evo. (Technically, it’s illegal to take photos in a federal courthouse, so I snapped a few shots in a hurry after hustling Crippen over to a poorly lighted corner.) But with a little touching up, the photo was presentable enough for publication. Take that, Mr. Merithew!

The only thing the Evo didn’t do for me was dispense beer.

Trust me, I had that angle covered.