HTC Fuze

A few weeks ago I replaced my broken Blackjack with an HTC Fuze. So far it seems to be an improvement. The HTC Fuze combines a touchscreen with important things like Send and End keys and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The slide-out keyboard is definitely an improvement on the Blackjack's tiny keys and allows the Fuze to be narrower than the Blackjack, if twice as thick. The Fuze is pretty heavy, and I have the feeling that it would not take well to being dropped. Another thing I like is that unlike the Blackjack, it has a standard Mini-USB port.

Software-wise the phone is marginal. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and comes loaded with HTC TouchFLO(tm) software which provides a shinier and more touch-friendly home screen. Of course it's not very customizable, so the first thing I did was turn it off. I like how it files SMS messages into conversations. I never used SMS on the Blackjack, so I don't know if this is a recent feature or not. When using the web browser I have run into an issue where it returns a "403 Forbidden" page for all sites. I suspect this may be an AT&T issue rather than a phone issue, as disconnecting and reconnecting to the network fixes it. This is made easier by the fact that the function performed by holding the End key is configurable, and I have configured it to toggle "airplane mode."

The voice quality on the Fuze is fine, but using it as a phone can get very irritating. The keypad is through the touchscreen. When a call is active, the display has a number of buttons for functions such as turning on the speakerphone, and you have to hit a softkey to bring up the keypad. Also, the screen turns off after a second while a call is active (presumably to avoid inadvertent touchscreen presses), so you have to press the power key to turn it back on. This makes using touchtone interfaces (like voicemail) very frustrating.

Today I woke up to find my phone frozen and had to remove the battery to restart it. I think the phone had been up for about a week. It's a sad state of affairs that I think a phone crashing after a week of uptime is marginally acceptable, but hey, it's WinMo.