Fixing The 10 Things We Hate About The Fuze

Yesterday Steve posted a great article about the top 10 problems with the Fuze out of the box. And an out of the box experience can’t be neglected – it’s one of the reasons why people love the iPhone. But I’m guessing a lot of you are visiting this site because you want to customize your Fuze and if there’s anything wrong with the out of box experience you want an answer. And fortunately since the Windows Mobile Phone community and groups like XDA Devs are so active and effective we can tweak just about any aspect of our phones. So, let’s do this one by one:

10. TP2/Fuze2 Ok, it feels like we just got married and we’re already looking at another woman. But let’s remember that by the time AT&T rolls it out it will likely be a full year since the release of the Fuze. Beyond that, think of all of the goodies that the Touch Pro 2 has already brought us. We have the TP2 icons, volume control, email setup wizard, calculator, g-sensor, keyboard, HTC album and Opera and by the end of the weekend we expect to have a new TF3D, contact card, menu enhancement, message enhancement, outlook enhancement and FaceBook SDK. So in the end I think we’ve gotten a lot out of the quick release of a successor.

9. GPS. Once GPS is up and running I find it extraordinarily good. Kind of gives me that ‘government is watching’ me feeling:) But as we know, just turning on an app that uses GPS tends to lead to a fail (unless you use TeleNav which triggers it to work perfectly). If you want GPS to work you need to use third party applications to ‘prime’ the GPS when you are restarting your Fuze (once you run the apps once you should be good until the next soft reset) which include using GPSToolPro or GPSTest and setting GPS to COM4 and baud rate to 9600. Of course, you can upgrade your ROM to the new AT&T test ROM or change your radio to 1.09.25.35 (from the Blackstone) since the new radios seem to solve the problem.

8. Battery Life. The Fuze has better life than the Tilt (at least in my experience). If you want to extend the life of your battery you can always turn 3G off when you’re not using the internet since it doesn’t cost much in functionality but gives a big battery boost. You can also set profiles that optimize your battery life (so you can toggle 3G, bluetooth, wifi,, etc) using G-Profile. Another battery killer is unnecessary apps that are running in the background (the iPhone took an 80% battery hit when multitasking so that should give you an idea as to how important killing background apps is). Obviously you can use the Task Manager Quick Menu (that little drop down in the top right of your home screen) to manually kill apps. Also, make sure that you have ‘x’ set to close and not minimize applications (Settings – System – Task Manager – Button tab). Or use an application like cleanRAM or Memaid to close hidden applications that run in the background.

7. The Camera. No one was troubled by the quality of the camera as much as I was (notice the use of the past tense). But I think we’re at a point where we know enough about how to tweak it that we actually have a pretty good camera and now I really use my Fuze like I have a real camera on me at all times (and not the junk experience I had out of the box). There are a few tweaks to reduce the lag in the time it takes to take a picture after having the shot focused and I have even posted a consolidated cab with all of the tweaks in our forums. On top of that, you should change the brightness setting and it helps to understand how touch and press works.

6. Games. I’ll admit that with the gsen and VGA resolution we really should have more commercial games. With that said, we have posted a lot of games that work for the Fuze and they’re mostly touch screen so the dpad isn’t so noticeable. Some games also work well with the up/down mapped to your A/B buttons, or you can use software to map your keyboard or remap the Home and Back keys for game play. 

5. TF3D. Without TF3D there wouldn’t be a MobileMatt Fuzeberry TF3D theme 🙂 But if you want speed and the ability to change the active tabs and their order without third party software then check out one of the Energy ROMs that has the new TP2 TF3D built in or just wait another day for it to be available for the rest of us as a cab:) You can always use a different user interface like PointUI 2 or Bell’s variant or SPB Mobile Shell…well there’s no shortage of replacement UI’s.

4. So Shiny. I think you went through it well already. if shine is a problem you can buy a new back cover or use a screen protector that will change the look and feel of your Fuze like Invisible Shield or Bodyguardz or Ghost Armor . I know it’s smudgy but I sorta like the shine – it really helps to make it look less ‘brick’ like:) Oh but if anyone from HTC is reading this – just coat the dang phone in the material those shield accessories use so we don’t need to buy it – I’ll pay you the extra $20 up front for that.

3. The DPad. HTC thinks so little of it that the TP2 won’t have one at all…so I prefer to be happy with what I have:) As we know, the dpad has a sweet spot and once you realize where it is it helps a lot. You can also use the tweak applications to get scrolling in more applications or use SensorScroll to enable scrolling in all applications. And I’m sure you know that the dpad works for scrolling but remember you can also use GScroll to get a lot more functionality out of your dpad. 

2. Landscape. We can’t change the form factor of our phones but a better on screen keyboard and automatically having rotation based on the gsen help to take our minds off of a sliding keyboard so we can reserve the slide out keyboard for the big jobs.  There is a known glitch in the Touch Pro that HTC is fixing in new ROM’s that does away with applications closing when the keyboard is opened but for that we’ll have to wait. For now, enabling the old style of autocorrection and autocompletion help to get the job done with less tapping. I also think the new TF3D port will give us a lot more landscape functionality so we won’t just have an app launcher when we rotate our phones.

1. Turn Off When Talking. Fortunately we now have two great solutions for the problems associated with the backlight turning off when we’re on a call. The first solution turns on the backlight during a phone call if the screen is oriented face up and turns it off if the phone is vertical (like against your ear). The second solution provides a tweak to give us the traditional solution which just dims the screen when on a call but never turns it off. Problem solved:)

Well I feel like we’ve done a lot in the short time we’ve had our Fuzes. Oh and while we’re at it, the PTT remapping has been solved and I think the 6.5 update will be available to those of us who choose to upgrade to it:)

Don’t worry, even though we have solutions to the top 10 nuisances that doesn’t mean we’re closing the site:)  Feel free to share any other solutions you have to the out of the box experience with the Fuze. of course, another thanks to Steve for his initial write up of the things we needed to fix:)