AT&T Fuze gets extravagant hands-on treatment
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 17th 2008 8:02AM
posted Nov 17th 2008 8:02AM
posted Nov 17th 2008 8:02AM
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I just got this phone the Tuesday it came out. The local AT&T store, which is fairly large, said they only got 3 in and I was the second. I love it. It does have the bulky Windows Mobile behind everything, but the TF3D interface sits on top of it so you usually don't have to go any deeper than the pretty touch interface. No it's not as easy or intuitive as the iPhone, but it's a lot more powerful.
Does anyone know anything about LET'STALK.COM? They are selling the FUZE with new contract for $99 with rebate. Which makes the FUZE Free. Is sounds too good to be true. I can buy the $99 fuze and get rebate and then Cancel my Iphone and still pay only $175.00 for fuze. Still cheaper then the ATT price. I am not Tied to my Cell phone number make no difference if i get another number. I am so over the IPHONE and paying a arm and a leg for a Cell Phone. I am new to this Comment board So I welcome comments and suggestions. Even the mean one's if they make since.
I think it should be fairly reliable since Wal-Mart has it's name all over it. See: http://walmart.letstalk.com
If I remember correctly the contract terms of those let'stalk plans were even more ridiculous than the iPhone
that free price is with a NEW contract only. you would have to add another line. the contract renewal price is the same, 249.99. to purchase outright is 509.00. you also have to have a plan that 59.99 or more.
I think LetsTalk.com has a secondary contract, above AT&T's contract, where they charge you their own termination fee if you cancel or change your account within 6 months. Just make sure you read EVERYTHING on the contract (which you should do with all contracts anyway).
the catch is 6 months of PDA plan , but you still paying $180 for a phone that it will cost you $270 otherwise and you are using the service.
I think I'm going for it.
I am a die hard Apple fanboy that is seriously considering getting this phone over the iPhone. It really irks me that the iPhone has no expandable storage, replaceable battery and has a stronghold on the app store, keeping out apps that would directly compete with the ones already found on the phone.
The day that this phone was launched I found a local ATT store with one and got to play around with it. I was very impressed with the overall feel and with the TouchFlo overlay. The only problem that I may have is with the size of the keys on the keyboard. I am 6'2" so my hands are larger than the average person.
Travis,
I too am a Mac fan. Despite that I bought the Fuze and even had it for two full days. The Windows Mobile is a quirky as you'd expect from Windows, and the Touch Flo 3D is great when it works. The two OSs don't always play nicely together, and in the first two days I had to twice do hard resets, fully deleting all of my add-ons and personalizations. It took me hours to install all of my email accounts and personalize the device the way I wanted.
I exchanged it for an iPhone which I completely configured in under 10 minutes and it's running beautifully. I had also wanted to change batteries and SIM cards, add memory, etc., but I can live without or easily find workarounds for those things. Having a smooth running OS/device means everything to me now. Particularily running a mac computer at home, connecting an iPhone is MUCH easier and more enjoyable than even the best Windows Mobile device (using very good third party translator software).
Just my two cents.
I doubt David had it, or else I don't know what kind of crazy customizations he is doing. I just removed all the AT&T crap from mine and it runs beautifully.
if i bought this phone, FN wouldnt stand for Function... but rather, "why isn't the F'N tab key right here?!"
fujitsu u810 comes to mind
i "FN" cant stand no tab key
I've been tracking fuzemobility.com - they've been showing all of the tweaks and freeware for the Fuze. They even showed how to remap the PTT button in detail. The Fuze is awesome - it's way beyond what the Tilt ever could be... This is the first WinMo phone that a regular person could use out of the box and figure out.
What the heck did they do to the keyboard?
Um...I haven't dug deep into the differences between the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro....but...
When I picked up a Fuze to play with...it looked identical to the Diamond with the odd shaped back...anyone? Does the Pro have the same and I'm just crazy?
i went into an AT&t store over this weekend. what a sham that place was. not one person would nor could answer any of my questions about the phone. i got to play with one but the Touch Flo was off. i thought the phone didn't have it! nobody had even heard of Touch Flo. couldn't get the camera to work either. i asked about the price for a new member. nothing. should this be enough for me to consider not going with AT&T? what a joke that store was. where was said store? Boulder, CO. i hope management reads this.
the phone did feel great, had diamond backing- cool. but high spots were already starting to wear. and the front face of the phone would move in an unnatural way that made it feel like it might break if pushed too hard. but i can't make a decision about this phone until i get to play with the Touch Flo. hope it doesn't suck because without it this phone was super boring and lame.
Just get one online and do it with this at Sprint: http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=173903
I really want to know what Engadget Mobile thinks as well as everyone else...
Maybe it was just my local ATT stores but damn this thing was the biggest pile of trash of a phone I have ever picked up. I tried two stores just in case the first one was inherently buggy for some reason.
When I picked up the phone the touch screen responded in about 3-4 seconds sometimes longer. The front keys [home, back, connect/disconnect] felt horribly plastic-y and just ugh it just didn't feel like a button it felt cheap. The whole phone overall just felt like a toy. Plastic feeling, cheaply made it just did not make out what I believed the previews made it seem.
I cannot even fathom dropping $300 for this crap. Switching between landscape and portrait took 5 seconds +. Both of the stores I visited both phones felt the same and both responded the same. How can anyone buy this phone and feel comfortable with it? I mean $300 after contract and rebate from ATT and what you get is something I cannot imagine anyone would be happy with.
Now before you start jumping to any conclusions I use personally a Motorolla ROKR [that I got for free from a friend] for the time being on a pay as you go. I was planning on getting into a new contract with this phone but I just cannot. I really want to know if it was just my ATT stores because gosh I am entirely let down by the hype behind this phone. From my personal hour or so experience, No way I would replace $300 in my pocket with this phone.
I would love to hear otherwise...I would also love to hear if others that were disappointed as well...
The hardware is there = fast. ATT bloatware = resource hog. I am running the stock ATT ROM with some minor TF3D tweaks and performance is way fast. No problems w/ GPS... yet.
Get your hands on a tweaked unit and see if that changes your mind. If you factor in some cooked ROMs, performance increases will be very evident.
Worst case: grab one and play for a while. if you don't like it, return it... you'd be out ~$60 for restocking, though.
My biggest gripe was the fact that ATT gimped the HSPA on the device. A simple reg change fixed that for me...
I picked one up on Friday & have spent the weekend configuring & testing it. Overall, it's a very good (but not perfect) device. Several things I've noticed:
1. GPS performance isn't as good as the Kaiser/Tilt -- I'm getting intermittent GPS signal loss while driving.
2. I've seen several app crashes. I've been using Windows CE devices since the original Casio A10 in 1997; I saw more crashes this weekend than in the previous 10 years of CE devices combined. Things did stablize a bit once I got all my software installed, strangely enough.
3. TouchFlo 3D is pretty cool -- it should make WM more approachable for non-techies.
4. I can't believe they didn't make the microSD slot accessible without taking the back off.
5. The VGA display is stunning; text is very crisp, such that ClearType is unnecessary.
I'd say it's roughly tied with the Kaiser as the best CE device I've ever used. Fix the GPS and the crashes, and it'd be perfect.
I would agree with you... this is the closest I've come to having a perfect handheld device to replace my phone, PDA, PMP, camera, and mp3 player, but the minor design flaws are annoying:
-The microSD slot was an afterthought, it seems (Diamond doesn't even have one). But having expandable storage is nice- once they get 32Gb cards out (at a reasonable price), I doubt I'll need to swap much anymore.
-Who the hell thought it would be awesome to make the back glossy and black?! It's not only a fingerprint magnet, but slippery as hell!
-Side buttons should have been placed on the other side. They're practically unusable when the keyboard is out, and the PTT button would almost be at the right place for a camera shutter button.
-Who uses PTT anyway? I would gladly trade the PTT button for a front-facing camera (MSN chat client supports it). Damn you, ATT!
-Phone could've used a dedicated 3.5mm headphone jack. I don't like having to remember an usb-audio adapter every time I want to listen to tunes.
Still, it's a great phone. I love the keyboard, the VGA touchscreen, and the camera is much better than any cellphone camera I've had before. The accelerometers are an added bonus (teeter helps pass the time when I'm in a waiting room, or at the airport, bored). Definitely better than the tilt.
I've played with the Fuze twice so far, and have been disappointed. I really, really want this phone to kick ass, but it just seems too slow to respond to be worth the money. My finger swipes weren't always correctly recognized, and dragging webpages around in Opera saw a noticeable delay. I'm wondering if it's because of the resistive touchscreen.
I'm no Apple fanboy, but the iPhone's touchscreen responds so much better than the Fuze's. I love the multi-touch zoom and the dragging around of the webpages. If the Fuze had those functionalities, I would go for it in a heartbeat. I hate how locked down the iPhone is, but I think the Fuze's touchscreen just isn't responsive enough for me.
Changing the responsiveness of the touch screen is another of those things you have to go hack the registry to change. I'm 'throwing' the engaget mobile main page around on mine right now, and it seems to always do what I want.
Of course you're still not going to get the multitouch of the iPhone, and Opera mobile seems to do this weird thing where it only keeps part of the page rendered (to save memory I guess), so if you scroll too far it has to start re-rendering that part of the page again, which kind of kills the smooth. Think I need to go digging in about:config.
It is definitely not as polished an experience as the iPhone, but I love having a real keyboard and real ssh and all my other hacky apps.
I got one on launch day by getting in early - I love it! Once I applied some hacks anyhow to remap the ptt button to something useful and speed up the TouchFlo 3D, which is pretty pokey as it comes configured. It's a bit bizarre that you have to go registry hacking it to get decent performance.
To Outinthedark - that's what you can expect on a WinMo device that hasn't been properly configured after it's been up for a day or two with all sorts of apps running on it. It runs low on memory and starts choking while trying to swap apps, and the TouchFlo 3D doesn't help that at all. You basically have to google for Fuze hacks and set it up properly. Yes, it's a travesty that they aren't properly set up out of the box, but that's just the way it's been all the way back to my Cassiopeia.
So far this device hasn't exhibited the other typical bane of WinMo phones, which is that it thinks it has a signal (and bars) when it's actually lost the signal and will never get it back until you soft reboot.
Thanks for the link, guys!!
You might also be interested in our even more painfully exhaustive full review: http://www.wmexperts.com/reviews/smartphones/review_htc_fuze_on_att.html
My boyfriend picked one of these up last weekend based on my enthusiasm for the phone. I have an iPhone and love it, but this phone looked sweet! My boyfriend is a WinMo lover, so I thought this QWERTY phone would be perfect for him.
He returned it before the weekend was up.
TouchFlo was jumpy and not intuitive. After using the iPhone's touch screen, well this doesn't compare. I messed around with the phone and which the TouchFlo overlay was cool, it was quirky and odd to use. It's a beautiful interface and a nice overlay for WinMo, but WinMo users prefer function over flair and while pretty, it was awkward to use. Sorry, the iPhone just kicks azz in this area.
He also could not get it to latch on to GPS for anything. Tried several times and nothing.
Also, could not get his video game emulators to work since when they run in portrait mode only. However, to assign key controls, you have to flip out the keyboard, which bumps the phone into a screen you can't get out of.
The camera was great! Very nice pictures.
No dedicated number keys was a downer, too.
Also, we couldn't pull weather for our area. Kind of a bummer since it's a cool feature.
Too many negatives for him to keep the phone. Back to the store it went!
Hi! Does anyone know how scratch-resistant or scratch-attractive the touch pro is?
Does it come with a screen protector? Does anyone recommend a screen-protector?
Summarizing as everybody else without the varnishing by "pro" review sites:
* unusable 5-way pad (undeterministic behavior) unless one does special finger acrobatics
* bad/underperforming 3G/H
* very slow to lock GPS as well as weak reception
* broken AGPS (makes GoogleMaps/Garmin continually loose GPS lock)
* GPS still a huge battery drain (compared to SiRFIII)
* useless PTT button unless one hacks it
* fairly useless smart touch scroll and not a good replacement for the missing jog-wheel
* volume buttons fairly useless for anything else (although plus of volume control anytime), and can't be used as jog-wheel.
* slider that blocks the volume and PTT buttons
* auto backlight never dims below 3 (too bright in darker rooms and poor battery performance)
* ATT logo eating screen space in Manila
* pointless HOME button (since Back and Hangup already go there in WM world)
* low GLbenchmark values (worst than even Touch Pro which are worse that Tilt's)
* finger-print magnet on all surfaces and will actually start crusting (unlike Kaiser)
* cheap-plastic back that starts wearing immediately on the diamond "points"
So, the major bads. The good is well-mentioned already.