New mobile – HTC Fuze by AT&T

I finally decided to upgrade my three year old telephone (HTC Wizard). After waiting for three months for AT&T to release their version of Samsung’s Omnia I came to realize that all rumors that AT&T actually was about to release it were wrong.

Well, I am still glad I waited since it resulted in the Fuze hitting the market just as I couldn’t wait any longer. For a good first glance check out Chris Koenig’s blog.

The HTC Fuze is a custom version of the HTC Touch Pro, that has been modified specifically for AT&T. I don’t know all the changes but there are some apparent ones:

• glossy finish vs. matte on the Touch Pro I saw. The glossy panel does catch finger prints like a whole FBI agency, but I can live with it.
• different keyboard, with a numerical keypad overlay on the qwerty keyboard. I quite like it, with a double clock on the Fn button the numerical keypad is active and it is really quick to type.
• A Push to Talk button on the left side. This is the one causing me some frustration. More to follow.

I am very happy with this solid telephone. It sits squarely in your hand. Coming from a HTC Wizard my previous phone was actually bigger so I am not spoilt by smaller, slimmer telephones. I really like the keyboard and how smoothly it slides open. You can even add a sound to the sliding action!

A more comprehensive review is available at Mobile Tech Review.

Buying the phone from AT&T was easy if a bit time consuming and confusing. It seems I have managed to sign up for a "special" contract that doesn’t match the online system, meaning I had to go through a manual customer service process over the phone. While that was a bit cumbersome the delivery took less than 24 hours (vs promised 2-3 days) which was a pleasant surprise.

I have now had the telephone for 36 hours and I am very happy. However it didn’t start out that way.

Having seen all the iPhone commercials (and my wife has an iPod Touch) I was very curious to explore the touch user interface TouchFlo 3D. While it is unfair to make a direct comparison, I have seen light flicks across the screen in the iPhone commercials and I tried to do the same with the Fuze – but my phone was broken! I thought… The phone just wouldn’t do what I was trying to get it to do. Every time I flicked across the screen it would do something, but not what I expected. As these things sometime work out, yesterday evening I went to a Christmas party, and lo and behold if an old acquaintance from HTC wasn’t there. Well, this was a good opportunity to complain!

Fortunately what my friend told me was that the screen operates with a different technology from the iPhone and requires a different approach to operating it with the fingers. After my friend showed me how to push a bit harder and more distinctly it dawned on me that it is in fact quite clever and not as sensitive as it may otherwise be. With this main hurdle solved I am now really happy with the phone.

There are still a couple of annoying and strange things going on:

First the Push to Talk, PTT, button is there to stay. Every time you press it, by intention or (more frequently) by mistake it tries to launch the for-pay PTT service and you need to manually cancel it. It would be nice to re-map this button to do something else but it seems AT&T has done something to prevent this from being easy as I am unable to re-map it in the Systems >> Button menu. I hope a registry fix will turn up on the Internet shortly…

The second problem is stranger; the Voice Command application that allows you to speak a command, e.g. "Call Lucy Hall at Mobile" appears in the Touch Flo program menu, but if you remove it (I wanted to move it from the end of the list to the beginning) there is no way to get it back. At least I have not been able to place it back in the menu.

All in all, there are some quirks to the phone but it feels really solid and I am happy I am the proud owner of one!