HTC 5800 Fusion Review

Camera:

The 5800 comes equipped with a standard 2MP camera, with no Flash or AutoFocus system. The camera may be activated by going into the programs menu, or by holding the dedicated side button on the right edge of the phone. The application only takes about 3 seconds to load, and uses the entire screen as the viewfinder, with camera option icons located at the bottom. There is only a brief second delay in taking an image, with an additional 3 seconds to save. Image quality is average for a 2MP device, and results are better than the images we took using the 1.3MP Q9m. However, we did not like the fact that the 5800 can only take images in portrait mode, instead of the traditional landscape mode. Pictures taken outside have good color saturation, but suffer from soft edges, with indoor pictures looking best only when a lot of light is present. Once images are saved (either to the phone or microSD card) you can view them in the Album.







Multimedia:

Like all the other Windows smartphone phones, 5800 has a pocket version of Windows Media Player, which is a combined audio and video player, capable of playing MP3, WMA, and WMV files. In the Library you will find all your music and videos saved in the phone and in the microSD card, sorted by Artist, Album and Genre.


During playback of a song the, interface is almost empty because it is also used for visualization of video files. The buttons are small, but they only replace the functions of the d-pad. By using its directions you can fast-forward and rewind in a certain track, to change tracks, to Play/pause or to control the volume. The player has options for Shuffle/Repeat and it is capable of creating Playlists.

Audio can be played through the built in mono-speaker, through the included stereo earbuds, or by using a Stereo Bluetooth device. We recommend using the last two options, since music played via the built-in speaker does not sound good at high volumes and causes a lot of distortion to be heard.


Software:

The HTC 5800 comes with 128MB of ROM and 64MB of DDR SDRAM, but you can increase the size of the memory by installing a microSD card up to 2GB in size.

As with most other Windows Mobile 6 devices, the 5800 comes equipped with Microsoft Office, including the mobile versions of Word, Excel and Power Point. We found that using the programs to be quite easy for opening E-Mail attachments and files on the microSD card. Also, we did not encounter the problems opening large files, as with did with the Q9m, since the 5800 does not use the less-powerful Documents To Go applications. As an add-on, the 5800 also comes with Adobe Reader LE to view PDF files. The only application that we see missing is a ZIP File opener.



There are only two preloaded games that come bundled with Windows Mobile 6: Solitaire and Bubble Breaker, but new applications can be downloaded and added.