jelly bean statue1 Some things to consider before updating to Jelly Bean on your HTC EVO 4G LTE

While the announcements of Jelly Bean on the HTC EVO 4G LTE have brought on a rush of people frantically checking their phone for updates, there are some things you might want to do in preparation for the update and a few things you might want to know.

If you’re rooted and on MeanROM, or most other custom ROMs, the check for updates option will never connect you to the update service. OTA updates by Sprint are disabled. That page will sit with a “waiting” indicator spinning until your battery runs out.

If you do not have your contacts backed up or synced with Google, go ahead and do that. HTC’s ruined a local address book of mine more than once.

If you have not S-OFFed your phone, you may want to consider doing this now. HTC generally patches exploits that have been used to obtain S-OFF in the past. While you’ll still be able to root your phone via an HTCDev unlocked bootloader, obtaining S-OFF and gaining the ability to flash back and forth between HBOOTs and radio versions, not to mention free-flashing kernels, may be out of your reach until someone finds an exploit again.

Do you like your phone now? If you’re not dealing with major problems like the HTC contact sync/lag problem, rebooting issues, etc., you might want to hold off updating and see what happens to the other people. Just remember, being avant garde can oftentimes result in you being cannon fodder.

Those are things to consider. I’m jumping in head first when it comes out and will let you know how it works. In other words, you might want to hold off and learn from my fail.