[Touch Pro, Fuze General] rdudejr:
Hi Guys,

First thank you all for such a great community. XDA truly "sold" me the HTC fuze...as I was very excited about such an excellent user base. I lurked here for a few days before I bought, and have lurked a few more days while I have played with the phone, so far with very positive experiences...

So here is my question...

I am an ex blackberry user...4 years running. Had the 7290 and the more recent 8800. I liked the phones but were frequently frustrated by things such as lack of home-brew software (or at least lack of software easy to find and well supported), lack of a decent web browser, lack of an attractive UI (albeit theirs was very functional) and lack of 3G (on att at the moment). Now I know that the BB Bold fixed some of this, but to me its the same ole blackberry tricks (do email real well, slack off on the rest), and I was really ready for a highly extensible smart phone.

Enter the HTC fuze...

I love the apps, love the idea of custom ROMS, love that it runs a very common platform (windows mobile, important as some companies write apps that only run on windows mobile), and love the sheer power of the HTC fuze (can easily browse filesystem, look at memory usage...its essentially a very small laptop), but I have one primary complaint...it does all these cool things, but IMO it does NOT do email/messaging/contact management well...and worse, I have not been as impressed with the web browser as I thought I would be (using opera, have not tried IE...also some of this is my fault, I am trying to use fat-client web pages vs mobile web pages, which are faster and just perform better). Now before I get flamed, let me clarify that I am using the Energy Rom 3.0, so some of my griefing may be self inflicted. That being said, here are some specifics of what irritations Ive ran into with messaging/email/contact management...ill list them out categorized in order of importance (can you tell I am an engineer?)

Email

1. No heads up display of new messages on the home screen (have to poke around to the email area to see if you have new messages)

2. Does not enter an @ and . symbol when hitting spacebar key while typing email address in "To:" field (ex-blackberry users will sympathize)

3. I get too many emails for the graphical envelope to be useful...it looks cool, but when I am 30 emails deep i really don't want to have to click menu to get to all messages, just let the mail icon take me right to the goodies please...

4. read/unread/replied messages are not well represented (could be that it is just different that the blackberry feel, but a different color or something would be nice...the standard is bold/yellow/dark is unread and light/white/shadowy is read...and replied as some sort of representation as well

There are a few others but those are the main ones

Messaging

1. Clicking the message, and then immediately beginning to type (as in to reply) will take you to the address book!!, in order to start a new message! It is beyond me why it does not just start entering text as a reply for your current message you are viewing, and this is a huge annoyance!

2. Found this the other day...replying to an MMS message by clicking gives an error (wont deliver) but hitting menu and then reply will then prompt for "MMS or SMS reply?" and the message goes through fine...irritating!

3. Tapping spacebar twice does not place a period, although not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence auto-capitalizes - this is a blackberry feature that is not here and i miss it :'(

4. Once again lack of proper heads up in the home menu....why is the clock giant??? Looks cool but waste of space...I would rather have a breakdown of my messages/emails/missed calls with limited details so I can see whats going on, on my home screen.

5. General slowness when going from the message browsing with the envelopes to the reply, detailed view.

Contact Management

1. Adding a contact is no where near simple...and there are too many "mines" you can accidentally click in the process which will do odd things like add an address book entry with no name in it, or call someone!

2. The "people" tab is useless...i removed it (not really a complaint as I fixed it...but I just don't understand that concept of favorites....that being said my background is in database administration so all data is good data to me, the more the merrier...explains my 500+ contacts, half of which i prob dont need but keep around just in case)

3. Last name first???? Blackberry was always first name last...further more, I entered a business the other day in my contact list, and it put the second part of the business name as the last name, leading to a very odd address book entry...I did not like that bit of assumption on the phones part.

So I guess you could probably sum up all my complaints into 3 things:

1. I am way too used to blackberry shortcuts and having a hard time weening myself off

2. There are 10 ways to do the same things and get to the same places on the phone, and some times a few of those ways are less buggy/intuitive than others...why not just have the best methods enabled only?

3. Too many buttons take you places you did not intend to be...its not one way in one way out of each module (mail, messaging, ect.)...its 5 ways in, 10 ways deeper, uh....im lost, how do I make a phone call? (I'm being facetious of course but you get my drift)

Anyways, I am not trying to slam the phone, it is slick, sexy, and free (refurb through an ATT deal), but I just need some ROM/tweak/psychological suggestions to make it "fit" me better.

Thank you all truly,

Crackberry addict in serious withdrawal