Digital Trends

 

As a cell phone, the Fusic is above average in voice and ringtone quality and volume. Reception in fringe areas was weaker than other Sprint phones we've used, and battery life is a bit lower than LG’s 4.5 hour rating, which won't be helped by music playing.

 

But that's not why you called.

 

While admirable for its varied phone and camera attributes, the reason you want this phone is its music capability. Or, more precisely, the reason you don't want it is for its lack of music function common sense.

 

Let's start with getting music into the phone. LG and Sprint assume you'll want to spend $2.50 a track to download music from Sprint's Music Store, which you can then download to your PC. More likely, you have a pile of tracks already encoded in MP3, WMA, AAC, or an MPEG-4 format such as RealAudio. This is where the trouble begins.

 

When connecting via the included USB cable and using Windows Media Player, the Fusic shows up not under its own name but as a generic hard drive. You can sync music as usual, but for some reason when you go to the Sprint Music Store player, none of the synced tracks are listed and we could find no way to access them from the Sprint store player, which enables you to create playlists. Your tunes are accessible, however, to play via the Fusic's external controls. (We say we couldn't find a way, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way; our test phone came sans manual. However, it is our contention that if a manual is necessary to figure out basic functions, the device is poorly designed).

 

You can also use a media card reader and use Windows Explorer to drag-and-drop tracks. However, you'll be confronted by two folders on a Fusic formatted microSD card, Media and Music. Music downloaded from the Sprint Music Store goes into the Music folder, natch. But the external player controls will only access music stored in the Media folder. (Mac users will have to transfer music via a card reader; Mac's won't recognize the phone using the USB connection).

 

If you don't intend on buying tracks from Sprint's online Music Store (and why would you at $2.50 a pop?), most of these issues can be dealt with.