AT&T Fuze Cell Phone Review - Making/Receiving Calls
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Marianne Schultz Published on April 24, 2009 Comment on this |
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| While it's quick to dial on the Fuze's virtual keypad, it takes forever and a day to make a call after it starting it up. It has a surprisingly low ringtone volume on its highest volume setting, but robust non-audio alerts can augment its abilities here. | |
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Dialing Speed (7.90)
It might be a stretch, but our guess is that no one wants a phone that takes forever to dial. After all, it is a phone, and its primary function is to make calls. Fortunately, this goes quickly on the Fuze, taking an average of 2.53 seconds and making it one of the fastest among our comparison phones.
Dialing a number
To conduct this test, we start at the home screen in the unlocked state and time how long it takes to go the phone application, dial a test number, and initiate the call. The quickest way to get to the phone application is to press the Send button, and the on-screen keypad is very responsive to quick inputs. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Send and End Buttons (5.5)
The front of the Fuze is completely flat, with no raised buttons to mar its profile and giving the Send and End buttons no raised markings to make them easier to find by feel alone. The are in their respective corners at the very bottom of the front, so they're easy to locate by feel after a very short time with the phone. While they're almost exactly like the Send and End buttons on the Touch Diamond, we found ourselves accidentally pressing them when aiming for the left or right buttons of the invisible D-pad, which didn't occur with the Touch Diamond. Regarding the buttons themselves, they offer good tactile feedback and travel and we like them just as much as we did on the Touch Diamond.
When making a call, there are no on-screen equivalents to the Send button, so you'll have to use the physical one. During a call, there is an on-screen End button that's large, well-labeled, and brightly colored in red, so you have your choice between it and the physical button to end a call.
Call Management (7.5)
The Fuze's call management features are very good, offering many features. The Fuze's call log can show you all calls, missed calls, sent calls, and received calls through the 4 shortcut buttons at the bottom of the screen. The Menu button offers access to the call timers for all and recent calls, while data timers Selecting an individual entry will bring you to a screen that will show the details for that call, including the date, time, and duration, along with the entire recent history for that number. Any call log entry can be added to your contacts list or deleted individually without needing to clear the entire log.
The call log showing all calls
During a call, 6 on-screen buttons allow you to put the call on hold, add a call to create a conference call, share video, mute the call, use the speakerphone, or go to the contacts list. The virtual Menu button offers much more, allowing you to access the call log, speed dial settings, create a note, and more. As on the Touch Diamond, default settings dictate that a new note dialogue will open when you remove the stylus from its slot, which is pretty neat.
An active call
Pressing the home button during a call will get you back to the home screen where you can proceed to access applications without any issues. On AT&T's 3G network, you can even use an application that requires a data connection without interrupting your voice call. You can also access the Voice Recorder application to record the call, though you'll only be able to record your end of the conversation unless you conduct the call in speakerphone mode.
Startup to Call (1.20)
Not everyone keeps their cell phone on all the time, and the first thing you may want to do when turning on your phone is to make a call, so we see how long this takes. Unfortunately, the Fuze is dismally slow in this test, taking an average of 1 minute and 23 seconds to go from completely off to the moment a test number is dialed and initiated, making it the slowest among all of our comparison phones. We do this test using the default settings, which includes loading the TouchFLO interface, which adds significantly to its start-up time, and we suspect this will go much quicker if you disable it and do without the eye candy that we find to be slow across the board to begin with. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Ring Volume (7.29)
To test ring volume, we use a sound pressure meter to measure a phone's ring volume at its highest setting. Frankly, we're used to having a phone nearly cause a little eardrum damage when we do this measurement, but the Fuze was a gentle ringer putting out only 72.9 dB at its highest volume setting, the lowest of the bunch. We're not entirely confident you'll hear the Fuze ring even in just moderately loud environments.
Ringtones (8.0)
We load test music files in MP3, AAC, and WMA format on to each phone we test and check to see if they are available to use as ringtones, and the Fuze had no problem allowing any of these files to be used.
Changing the ringtone
When you select a music file to be used as a ringtone, it will start playing from the beginning of the song, and there's no way to change this or edit the song on the device to use a specific portion as a ringtone - unfortunately, the Fuze is missing the MP3 trimmer application that could do this on the Touch Diamond. You can easily purchase new ringtones from AT&T, which will run you around $2.49 each or less if you join the MyMedia club. Sounds recorded with the Voice Recorder application can also be set as ringtones. Overall, the Fuze offers good ringtone flexibility, though we always like to see some on-device editing to customize ringtones even more.
Non-Audio Alerts (9.0)
The Fuze has a pretty robust vibrate mode that we were able to clearly feel in a pants pocket and also made that annoying phone-vibrating-on-flat-surface sound on our desk. Vibrate mode is on or off, with no settings offering different strength levels or vibration patterns. The entire screen lights up during an incoming call, as do the backlight between the Send button and surrounding the D-pad's center select button. A missed call will make the backlight surrounding the center select button to light in a circular pattern to alert you. While there are no other LED lights to flash at you, the backlight flashing is a cute touch and we think the Fuze will do a good job getting your attention in silent mode.
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