Sharp FX Plus

Ive had this phone for a little over 2 months and its done everything you could think of. freezing, touch screen starting to malfunction. Will try to maybe restore it to factory default and see if that works. The below reviewer described almost all the problems. This phone for me was an inexpensive way to get an android phone but what I have is not reliable. Its better to go with something a bit more name brand/expensive.

When I am on a call, frequently it drops the call, or it does something even worse.. it mutes me apparently and I can obviously still hear the other person, but my call screen has disappeared as if I am not even on a call and I can't do anything until the other person hangs up. Often it does things on it's own, like renames a contact or adds numbers to a contact. The battery life is atrocious. I have had this phone for about a month and a half and within the first week it barely lasted a day. Now it lasts between 6 and 12 hours. Sometimes it freezes and i have to take the battery out to restart it. The touch screen sometimes stops working or is so hard to work it's ridiculous. Sometimes when I am on a call it has a horrible echoing. It takes horrible pictures, which I could deal with as it is not a camera, but all the other problems make this even worse. It lags when using the browser. 90% of the time it tells me something is wrong with my SD card or that it couldn't load it. But it was a brand new SD card! And it loaded just fine at first.

The Sharp FX Plus is a nice phone, and the most accessible smartphone with a keyboard on AT&T's GoPhone service. It can usually be found for free with a new contract or $300 no-contract. Its price is probably its biggest con. The Sharp FX doesn't have any high-end specs and it comes with Android Froyo instead of Gingerbread or Ice Cream Sandwich. Therefore, $300 is too pricy for a prepaid or non-contract phone. If you manage to look past the price tag, what do you get?

Lets start with the hardware keyboard. It is more comfortable than its size might suggest. I have big hands and still had no issues adapting to the FX Plus' keyboard. As a phone, it has excellent audio quality. Bluetooth headsets work fine with the FX Plus, both for telephone and for multimedia. The display looks nice. It may not have an HD resolution but text looks crisp and easy to read. There are also plenty of applications in Android Market that supports the FX Plus' HVGA resolution.

The phone is thinner than the pictures suggest. It is very pocket-friendly. What isn't necessarily pocket-friendly is the uber-huge AC charger with the thicker than usual micro USB cable.

Sharp did some minor tweaks to what otherwise would've been a stock Froyo Android experience. The tweaks to the lock screen and incoming call screens are nice touches. The audio equalizer is another welcome addition to what otherwise is the same bland stock Android music player. The Sharp Launcher is not as nice looking as TouchWiz or Optimus UI, but it is also less invasive. So far, the only thorn software wise if the heavy AT&T branding. Not only you'll have AT&T's customary bloatware, which can't be uninstalled, but you'll always see their name in the status bar, and the Contacts application takes forever to load as it attempts to load contacts from an AT&T server. Fortunately this search for contacts in AT&T servers can be disabled, which speeds up the loading of the Contacts app.

Data speeds are fine on 3G. Ironically things aren't that rosey in Wi-Fi. Speeds are slower, if the connection works at all, because venturing far from the Wi-Fi router will drop the connection much sooner than it would on other phones.

I don't know which one is worse between the camera or the battery life. None of these impresssed me, at least not in a positive way.

Overall, the Sharp FX Plus is a nice basic smartphones that handles some things (calls and messaging) better than many high-end phones. Still, it's not a phone for gaming or watching Flash web content. If you have the correct expectations and you get the phone for free or for a discounted price, you will enjoy this phone. I wouldn't pay the $300 AT&T is asking for it o prepaid, except that Sharp FX Plus is the least expensive smartphone with QWERTY you can get on Go Phone.