In our HTC Fuze review, we check out AT&T"s new answer to the HTC Touch Pro, and wonder if this phone is polished enough to be the most powerful smartphone on the market.
Review summary of the HTC Fuze:
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 While this phone draws its most recent comparisons with the HTC Touch Pro on Sprint, since the devices are nearly identical in features, the real question might be whether the HTC Fuze is a worthy successor to the AT&T Tilt. In that respect, the HTC Fuze is the new super-phone on AT&T, and it is a much more polished and advanced phone than the Tilt was. It says more about the smartphone market these days that we can look at the HTC Fuze and lament its performance flaws, even while we marvel at the cutting-edge screen resolution and huge, roomy keyboard. We'd also like to see HTC break out and try something snazzy and colorful to complement the VGA display, instead of the static grey and black of AT&T's TouchFLO 3D theme. Overall, though, this phone-that-does-everything is a market-leader in terms of features and style, and if you can stand a little lag from time to time, it's a top-notch business device. Release: November 2008. Price: $300.
Pros: High-end hardware with all the trimmings. Great screen, nice interface design. Good call quality.
Cons: Some performance issues kept the phone from being as responsive as we'd like. Camera is sub-par. Windows Mobile lurks beneath the surface.
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Full HTC Fuze Review:
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Hardware design - Good
The HTC Fuze is almost identical to the HTC Touch Pro, just released on Sprint. It's a slide-out QWERTY smartphone with a dominating 2.8-inch, VGA touchscreen. That's right, we said VGA, which means 640 by 480 pixels. The screen is great, though it was hard, especially on this AT&T model, to find justification for such a high-resolution display.
The keyboard pops out with a springy click, and we heard a bit of a rattle in this phone that wasn't present in the stiffer Sprint Touch Pro. Other differences are minor. Instead of a top row of numbers on the keyboard, the HTC Fuze gets symbols, with a numeric square laid atop the keys on the right side of the keyboard. The back of the phone is faceted and glossy, more like the unlocked versions of the HTC Touch Diamond that we've seen, and not like the smooth, rounded back on Sprint's HTC Touch Pro. The whole skin of the phone is glossy piano black, while Sprint's version went for a more comfortable, less fingerprint-prone soft-touch finish.
Except for a push-to-talk key on the side, there are no dedicated hardware keys around the phone's exterior to open the various features and apps. All of these are placed on the keyboard, instead. With the keys open, you can jump right into various messaging functions (IM, SMS and e-mail), the music and Cellular Video player apps, the connections manager or the Web browser.
Interface design - Very good
The hallmark feature of the HTC Fuze, and all the new HTC Touch-related devices, is the new TouchFLO 3D interface. Basically, it's an overlay that helps users avoid Windows Mobile as much as possible, all the while bringing a pretty and useful tabbed menu system to the top level. It's kind of like a maze, where you want to stay within the boundaries, because if you accidentally fall out of the maze you'll be in Windows Mobile land. For instance, you can choose the Music tab from the main screen and access a nice, pretty music player with good playback control. Or, you can choose AT&T Music from the "AT&T" tab, and then you are caught in the quagmire of the standard Windows Media Player, an app so stupid it doesn't check the microSD card for music tracks, and so outdated-looking it doesn't belong on a top-of-the-line smartphone.
We had serious responsiveness issues with the HTC Touch Pro on Sprint, and we won't say that our HTC Fuze review unit is much better, but in general we had an easier time moving around on the home screen. Apps still took a while to open, though, and the phone could feel very sluggish at points. Sometimes, when we were scrolling long lists, like our music library or the list of all programs on the phone, the HTC Fuze would select whatever our finger happened upon last, even though we had more scrolling to do. It was an annoying design flaw, one remarkably similar to the problem we had on the Samsung Behold on T-Mobile.
AT&T has installed a home page tile devoted to the carrier's various apps and services, including AT&T Navigator, AT&T's Cellular Video and AT&T Music, as well as some productivity tools, like the WorldCard business card scanner. Otherwise, the differences between the interface on this phone and the HTC Touch Pro are a matter of theme and color. The AT&T HTC Fuze is white and grey, while the Touch Pro on Sprint is black with yellow accents. They both have the same great screen, and on this high-res display we like the darker colors much more. Still, functionally they were identical.
Calling - Good
Calls on the HTC Fuze sounded very good, better than calls on the HTC Touch Pro we tested. Could it be the HSDPA network? The different internal hardware? Who knows, but AT&T also claims much better battery life on this phone than we saw on the CDMA-based HTC Touch Pro. Both phones use the same size battery, at 1340 mAh, and in our experience HSDPA has always been a battery hog, so even if the phone boasts longer talk times, the more you hit the data network the shorter your actual results will be. Reception was problematic. The phone was always 1-2 bars behind our Apple iPhone 3G, which runs on the same network. Still, the lack of bars didn't seem to hurt either the phone's call quality or it's data speeds, so this wasn't really a problem.
There is a dedicated contacts icon that jumps right into the contact list, but you can't start typing a name into the keyboard from the standby screen. That's too bad, since the jump into while-you-type searching is one of our favorite features in Windows Mobile Professional. Instead, the HTC Fuze opens up a special home screen when you open the keyboard, perhaps because redrawing the complex, hi-res TouchFLO 3D menus would be too labor intensive for this handheld. In any case, it was only an extra button press to get into our synchronized address book, and we could always assign favorites to the rolodex on the home screen.
For calling features, the phone uses Microsoft's Voice Command software, which isn't quite as user friendly as Nuance's software, but it did work every time we remembered the correct command. The speakerphone on the HTC Fuze was nice and loud, maybe an 8, though we always prefer cranking it up to 11. Conference calling was easy enough. Even though it required some menu drilling, HTC's improved call screen includes larger-font menus that are easy to press with some accuracy. Too bad all these Windows Mobile improvements don't go deeper, like all the way down.
Messaging - Very good
For messaging, the HTC Fuze takes the standard Windows Mobile package a step further with AT&T's XpressMail. It isn't quite as good as Outlook with an Exchange server, since Outlook can also handle some HTML e-mails. But with plenty of presets for various e-mail services, XpressMail made setting up Gmail, in addition to Exchange, a bit easier. We just wish it would use the Gmail IMAP settings, instead of POP.
For IM fans, the HTC Fuze has a basic-looking client with presets for AOL, MSN and Yahoo. The phone also does a nice job with picture messaging and has the standard SMS app. Messages are displayed on the home screen, in an envelope for e-mail, but we think HTC can go much further to enhance the topscreen experience. Let us browse our e-mails a bit, or see threaded conversations for SMS messaging. We'd like more functionality, as well as more flash and dazzle.
The keyboard on the HTC Fuze is great, and thanks to some layout choices, we like it even more than the keyboard on the HTC Touch Pro. The top row of keys are all symbols, so no need to hold down a function key to type "@" or a comma or period, as well as all the punctuation necessary for smilies, we notice. The keys are small, but soft and comfortable for fast typing. The numeric keys require a modifier key, but we usually just used the onscreen number pad for dialing calls, and opened the keyboard to type a contact name.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
The HTC Fuze gets the standard Windows Mobile scheduling and business suite, which is not a bad thing, though these apps could use a visual upgrade. Still, the calendar and Office suite are among the most powerful in the business, especially on the touchscreen Professional edition of Windows Mobile. We also had fun with the WorldCard business card scanning software. It wasn't perfectly accurate, but it was usually very close, and required only a bit of correcting to create a quick, complete contact entry. Of course, it couldn't read the card of our goofy hypnotist friend, but it has his picture and a sunset in the background, so it was tough to parse. Addditionally, there is a Mobile Banking app, though our bank has its own mobile software, and a Wikipedia search app included as well.
Some folks might be looking at the HTC Fuze as a Push-to-Talk option, as well. We didn't have another AT&T PTT device to use for testing, but the HTC Fuze has access to the standard AT&T PTT features, with a separate Windows Mobile app. No visual update from HTC on that one, though that would have been a cool choice.
Multimedia - Good
The HTC Fuze on AT&T benefits more from the interface enhancements that HTC made to this device than from the additional content and apps that AT&T added. As we mentioned, AT&T Music leads to an inferior music player, as well as a MusicID paid service, and the selection of streaming XM radio stations. The streaming radio sounded pretty good, in fact, and performed fairly well, though the interface wasn't touch friendly. And that was our problem with the multimedia experience. Anything not directly influenced by HTC was not touch friendly. The TouchFLO 3D media player was good for playback, though the CoverFlow-style album covers behind the song info are a fake out, they don't actually do anything.
Video on the device looked better than it does on your average AT&T 3G multimedia device, but no where near as good as AT&T's Mobile TV service. We wish AT&T would have given the HTC Fuze the full MediaFLO (no relation) treatment. The phone has a full-resolution TV screen for a display, but finding great quality video content to play on the phone is a real chore. Videos that were encoded for the Apple iPhone's lower-res screen worked fine, if they were non-DRM, of course, but higher-resolution files, like a 480p movie trailer we downloaded, wouldn't play at all. With the best screen on the U.S. market right now, the video experience on the HTC Fuze should have been a selling point, but it feels more like an afterthought.
GPS navigation - Good
The HTC Fuze comes preloaded with TeleNav's AT&T Navigator software. In our tests, the software took a few minutes to find our position initially, but then had no trouble keeping track of us as we traveled through rural New Jersey. For some of the more local sections of our trip, the navigation app wasn't able to alert us in time for a couple turns, and we would have gotten lost if we didn't already know the way. Still, the GPS maps looked good on the HTC Fuze's screen, and the new maps were quick to load over AT&T's fast network.
Camera - Good
For a 3-megapixel camera with auto focus, the pictures we got from the HTC Fuze should have been much better. The camera had trouble handling bright daylight, and details were frequently fuzzy, even when the focus should have locked in. Pictures at full zoom had a digitized, over-sharpened look. At best, pictures were accurate and clean, but nothing worth printing from our stack. Also, the camera took a long time to take the shot. There was no two-stage button for the auto focus, we just pressed the button and the process took off without us. Sometimes this seemed to be quicker than others, but it was never as instantaneous as it should have been.
Curvy road
Pond and bridge
A couple of outdoor shots. The HTC Fuze took what was left of the fall colors and faded almost everything to brown. In the darker areas, noise isn't too bad, but details are completely lost to a dark haze, especially in the bend to the right of the road. On the pond, the details are too hazy near the edges to see the tree branches or the ripples on the water.
Tree bark up close
Tree looking up
A couple shots that show what auto focus can do for a camera. The straight-ahead bark shot isn't close enough to be called macro, but we were impressed by the even lighting and the level of detail. We held on with both hands to keep the camera steady. For the second shot, you can see how the autofocus picks the spot in the middle, and the camera actually achieved a nice depth of field looking up the length of the tree.
Self portrait
The camera was easy enough to use for a self portrait, though a mirror might have helped. Also, it was tough to know when the auto focus-to-shot process was finished, and we moved early on a few occasions.
eBay shot
The camera gets the important details in this shot for eBay selling. The tiny rips on the card, as well as the small-print lot numbers are all clearly visible.
Web browsing - Good
The HTC Fuze uses the Opera Mobile browser, which is one of the better third-party browsers available for a mobile phone. It's almost as good as Apple's Safari browser, but the hardware problems with the HTC Fuze holds back the experience. The Web browser, more than any other application, gave us problems with responsiveness, and it did not respond well to our touch. Pages just didn't glide by like they do on the Apple iPhone, though load times were head-to-head with AT&T's other touchscreen phone. Worst of all, the browser would often click on a tiny link that we were trying to flick past. Otherwise, pages looked clean and accurate, with a layout comparable to a desktop-grade browser.
We wish the Web pages looked a little better on the high-res screen, because it isn't easily apparent what all those extra pixels on this VGA display are actually getting us. We expected Web pages might have more room to spread out, while still looking sharp and legible, but this wasn't the case. One this we did like is the ability to zoom in by circling the navigation button. We wish the navigation button worked as a scroll everywhere on this phone, but it only works in a few spots, mostly zooming in on photos and Web pages.
Price and availability
The AT&T Fuze by HTC is available now for $350 with a two-year contract. A $50 mail-in rebate will be given when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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