This weekend, I picked up the new HTC Evo 4G, which has been sold out of Sprint stores for the last month. And while I’ve only performed a cursory evaluation of the OS, I’m worlds happier than I was with Windows Mobile 6.1. The operating system isn’t new to me, however, as I spent nearly a day-long barbecue stealing Itay‘s Nexxus One and spent the last year looking over Zeh‘s shoulder as he fiddled with his MyTouch. Needless to say, I liked what I saw. My geekiest of friends had given Android 2.2 two international thumbs up, so my purchase was clear.

My previous phone was the HTC TouchPro—recommended by my older brother—which, from the beginning, was laden with disappointment. And for the six months since Italy’s recommendation to wait for the Evo, I worried about how much dissatisfaction was attributed to HTC and how much to Windows Mobile.

With three brothers using the TouchPro, my other brother railed against the fragile body of the phone. I baby mine, pamper them and virtually swaddle them in hard plastic and shock-absorbing rubber. Mike, however, is accident prone when it comes to mobile technology. Six months after getting the Blackberry 7105, key pad numbers started falling off. A few weeks after getting his shiny new Pearl, the pearl popped off and rolled down the subway platform. His Frankensteinian TouchPro’s case, after two or three light and low falls, was more superglue than the inferior plastic HTC chose to craft them in. And while I didn’t see much deterioration of my phone’s body, I was leery of the Evo’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking.

But the heart of my concern was how the hardware interacted with the software; how much of the irregularities of the TouchPro, the unexpected responses, the locking up, the repeated dials and needs for reboot, were spawned by HTC’s hardware and how much was Windows Mobile.

Aside from Seesmic stopping responding once and USB Debugging loading on its own, I see my fears of HTC’s hardware were unfounded. To be honest, my aforementioned Israeli and Brazilian advisers had dissuaded me from believing the hardware was an issue anyway (one is a Unity coder, the other runs Ubuntu on his laptop, and neither can be called a hardcore Microsoft zealot in the first place), but I wanted to learn this for myself. The operating system is not only stable and reliable, but intuitive, well-designed and a dream to use. And after a year on WinMo 6.1 and only a weekend on Android 2.2, I can firmly say: I’ve bathed in the baptismal waters of Android, seen its glorious light and arisen a penitent and uplifted Google convert. All praise Sergey.