HTC EVO Awarded Popular Mechanic’s Breakthrough Award

Popular Mechanic gives out awards for cell phones? Go figure. Anyway, today they’ve announced that a (there’s more than one winner for different categories) Breakthrough Award was given to the HTC EVO. “Breakthrough Awards recognizing the innovators and products poised to change the world in the fields of technology, medicine, aviation, environmental engineering and more. Awards are given to a handful of new products that set benchmarks in design and creativity to provide a picture of the best technology of today and tomorrow.” And there are some real people voting on this:

In selecting the candidates and winners of the 2010 Breakthrough Awards program, the editors of POPULAR MECHANICS (PM) canvassed a wide range of experts to come up with a list of worthy nominees. In addition, members of PM’s editorial board of advisers, which includes astronaut Buzz Aldrin and MIT’s Amy B. Smith, and contributing editors, including MythBuster Jamie Hyneman, reviewed the nominations to help choose the innovators. PM editors test hundreds of products in a wide range of categories all year in order to arrive at the true game-changers for the Breakthrough product awards.

It definitely has the specs to win from the 1ghz processor, 4.3” screen, 8mp HD camera (plus 1.3 front facing), HDMI out, 4G, etc. The leading complaint seems to be the battery life. What do you think? Valid award rightfully won or shenanigans? I’ll say this much – on paper it’s hard to beat what the Evo puts down.