AT&T Fuze Cell Phone Review - Software
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Marianne Schultz Published on April 24, 2009 Comment on this |
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| With the powerful Windows Mobile operating system and thousands of 3rd party applications available, there isn't much you can't do with the Fuze. With that said, the TouchFLO interface HTC uses is absolutely awful - painfully slow to respond and it offers nothing more than eye candy over the standard Windows Mobile interface. | |
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OS (8.5)
The Fuze runs Windows Mobile 6.1, a well-established operating system that earns a standard 8.5 points in our scoring guide. As with the Touch Diamond, TouchFLO, the user interface added by HTC, adds some eye candy but we find it ultimately more trouble than it's worth. It's very slow to respond in most situations and doesn't enhance the functionality or overall user experience in our eyes and we highly recommend that everyone disable it and just work directly with Windows Mobile without any pretty layers to cover it up.
The Start menu
Home Screen Score (8.0)
The TouchFLO interface gives the Fuze a unique home screen compared to other non-HTC Windows Mobile devices. You still see all of the normal status information to show you signal strength, battery level, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi status, and more, along with a large clock, call history status, and a upcoming appointments in the center. This home screen is meant to be finger-friendly, allowing you to flick through up and down to see more of your upcoming appointments and scroll through the tabs at the bottom to get to your pictures, messages, and other functions. It's pretty but not overwhelmingly informative.
The TouchFLO home screen
If you turn off TouchFLO, the standard Windows Mobile Today screen is quite informative and you're able to select the information most important to you to view here. Had the standard Today screen been the Fuze's default, it would earned more points here.
The home screen in landscape orientation
Extensibility (9.0)
The Windows Mobile operating system is highly extensible with literally thousands of applications available to increase its functionality. Handango.com shows us 3,166 applications available for the Fuze, though not all of them may be fully compatible given the Fuze's button layout and the TouchFLO interface. Additionally, the Fuze can run Java applications. Though all of this may not quite catch it up to the iPhone 3G with over 25,000 applications available in the App Store, Fuze owners will have no shortage of ways to make their device do more.
Customizability (9.0)
If you leave the TouchFLO interface active, you won't be able to change much beyond the home screen's wallpaper image. If you turn it off, you can apply themes that will change the colors and fonts of the entire interface. There are only a few on the Fuze to begin with, but you can download many more online from sources like Handango and Zedge.net. The Start menu can be customized to show the applications you use the most, and plug-in applications can add more to the home screen beyond what's available in the Today screen settings. Like other Windows Mobile devices we've reviewed, the Fuze earns a high score here with all of these customization options.
OS Responsiveness (3.0)
We experienced massive lag in all applications in accessing menus or using the back button to exit back to the home screen. It was so frustrating at times that we found ourselves pushing the back or home button repeatedly to see if the Fuze would do anything at all when it was clear nothing was happening in response to our initial button press. As with the Touch Diamond, we suspect this has a lot to do with the TouchFLO interface, and our very first suggestion to any new user is to turn it off as soon as you take the Fuze out of the box since it will give you more grief than it's worth. We previewed some upcoming HTC devices at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, and we can only hope that this interface has gone through a major overhaul to make it more responsive.
One significant annoyance had to do with long menus in all applications - they would immediately scroll all the way to the bottom when opened, hiding the menu options at the top of the list, requiring us to scroll a bit to get to the top. This was particularly frustrating since the "New" menu option is usually at the top of the menu and we shouldn't have to scroll around to get to it like this.
Browser Features (10.0)
While the Fuze has 2 browser installed out of the box - Opera and Internet Explorer - we scored the Opera browser here since it is the default one that is used whenever you open a link in another application. Opera is pretty full-featured and is able to handle just about everything you'll encounter on the web, including WAP and HTML pages, Javascript, and frames but not Java or Flash. It won't help you with Atom or RSS feeds, however, though you can save images to the Fuze's memory or choose to send them as attachments to MMS or email messages. It can handle encryption and cookies and manage your passwords and automatically fill in fields.
The browser tab in the TouchFLO interface
Browsing Interface (10.0)
Though it doesn't have a screen as large as those found on the Blackberry Storm and iPhone 3G, the Fuze is still fairly pleasant to browse the web on. Full HTML pages are rendered pretty much as you'd see them on your desktop and its accelerometer allows you to easily switch between landscape and portrait view simply by changing the phone's position. You can zoom by double-tapping on the section of the page you want to see more closely or by rubbing your finger clockwise or counter-clockwise around the D-pad's center select button. If you want a more permanent change to help you view text more easily, you can change the font between 3 size options in the Settings menu. As on the Touch Diamond, we're still disappointed that you can't use the D-pad's directional buttons to scroll around web pages - you must use the touch screen to navigate around.
Viewing a page in the browser
Unlike many other phones we've seen, the Fuze does a good job of holding on to your browsing history, showing a breakdown of your history from the current day, yesterday, earlier this week, last week, and older, although it's not search-able. Menu options allow you to clear the cache and manage other privacy options.
The browser's history menu
Advanced features, like the ability to have multiple pages open at once and download applications directly to the phone's memory, are also present. All in all, most users should be well pleased with the Fuze's interface and capabilities here.
The browser's bookmarks menu
Browser Access (8.0)
Unlike the time-based tests we do in other areas, here we count how many steps it takes to navigate to a web page to see how easy it is and to avoid network connection speed as a factor. We count every screen or button press, though we count the URL entry as a single step. As with the Touch Diamond, we count the action of pressing on the home screen and scrolling right to get to the Internet tab in the TouchFLO interface as a single step since it can be done in one instance of screen contact. Beyond this, it takes 4 more steps to complete this test, earning the Fuze 8 points.
Gaming (5.33)
The Fuze comes pre-loaded with demo versions of Block Breaker Deluxe, Brain Challenge 2, Bubble Bash, Midnight Pool 3D, Ms. Pac-Man, and Sudoku, while the versions of Bubble Breaker, Jewel Quest II, Solitaire, and Teeter are full versions. Most of these are Java games, while others are native applications, and we found them to be hard to play on the Fuze with its not-sensitive-enough touchscreen.
Playing Tetris
You can easily buy games from AT&T, and we purchased Tetris for a steep $9.99 for unlimited play. We found it hard to play with the D-pad since it's so easy to press the Home or Back buttons that will exit the game and using the touchscreen isn't much better because of its lack of sensitivity.
Calculator (6.0)
No change in the calculator on the Fuze compared to what we saw on the Touch Diamond and other Windows Mobile devices. It will handle basic calculations but not much else.
The calculator - nothing exciting here
Alarm (8.0)
As with previous Windows Mobile devices we've seen, the alarm function is not is own application but is instead a part of the Clocks & Alarms pane in the main Settings menu. Nothing alarming here (yes, we meant to say that, and no, we couldn't help ourselves) - you can set up to 3 alarms with custom recurrence during the week and you can choose the alarm sound, vibrate mode, and backlight flashing settings for each. While this is more than enough to get you out of bed for work every morning and more, we'd still like to see more recurrence settings and the ability to set more than 3 alarms.
The alarm settings pane
Document Software (6.0)
The Fuze comes with Microsoft Office Mobile to let you view and edit Microsoft Excel and Word files, and view PowerPoint files. Part of this package is OneNote Mobile that allows you to create notes, complete with multimedia elements, that can be synced with a companion application on your PC. Adobe Reader LE is also on board to let you view PDF files.
A new Microsoft Word document
Other Software (0.0)
In this section, we consider software that adds significant functionality to a device, or something that is unique among the cell phones we've seen. The Fuze comes with AT&T's MobiTV ad that will give you live streaming television over the cellular network. However, AT&T charges $9.99 month for unlimited access to this feature, even if you have an unlimited data plan. If you want to just try it out, you've only got 5 minutes of trial time. If this were a free feature included with an unlimited data plan, which most Fuze users would be likely to get anyway, MobiTV would earn it an additional point here.
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