Evo 3D stock ROM results

It has now been officially one week of using the HTC stock ROM on my EVO 3D.  Here is the TL;DR version in bullet points of my findings.

Pros

• Excellent idle battery life -often lasted two days
• SMS and MMS working
• Calling works without drops
• GPS / navigation works
• Keyboard is acceptable once calibrated and tracing is enabled (Yes, the stock keyboard has trace gestures)
• 3D camera works (Not that I care)
• ROM is smooth overall

Cons

• Battery life is drained quickly my doing anything on the phone (screen on)
• Data speeds are slow ( more likely a VM issue)
• GPS slow to lock on
• Keyboard suggestions are usually wrong, typing on the keyboard is sucky
• Sense is an ugly UI with overly detailed icons, which are all too similarly colored.

Under light loads, this ROM allowed
my EVO 3D to go over a day before
recharging. 

In more words, the stock ROM isn't all that bad.  Other than the fact that many of we power users are not fans of the Sense bloat, the stock ROM performed well enough to get me through the week.
Using the latest radio firmware version, the stock ROM had no problems sending or receiving texts or MMS.  As many of you may be aware, the original radio firmware often produced errors when sending text messages.  The signal indicator frequently jumped from full signal down to 1-2 bars and back however.  Other than slow, data speeds the signal fluctuations didn't seem to affect functionality of the phone.

A small but important issue that bothers me about the stock ROM, is that it holds certain preset associations for apps instead of asking the user each time.  For example, when I click a link in an email, it open the stock browser.  If I want to change this behavior, I navigate through the system settings menu and choose a different app to associate with URLs.  I want to be able to choose each time which browser I use.

The keyboard on the stock ROM out of the box is utterly useless.  It is totally uncalibrated so hit detection is off by an entire key.  I was continually pressing 'O' instead of 'I' or 'M' instead of 'N'.  Once calibrated however, the Sense keyboard is on par with other traditional android keyboards.  Enabling tracing makes the keyboard function much like Swype, except better in most cases.  Although I installed Swiftkey, my favorite keyboard, I was never irritated enough by the stock keyboard to need to use it.

While I hate the interface of the stock ROM, and it lacks power user customizations that I'm used to, I could continue to use it on a daily basis.  The stock ROM is reasonably smooth and gets me through the day with battery life to spare.  Stay tuned for my thoughts on CM10 next week.