Ever since Sprint got its HTC Touch Pro in early November, the rest of the cell phone community (non-Sprint users) has been getting a little antsy to find out when they might be able to get their hands on the Windows Mobile smartphone. Well, for AT&T subscribers, that day was 11th of NOV.

On Tuesday, the carrier officially took the wraps off the HTC Fuze, which is now on sale for $299.99 with a two-year contract and after a mail-in rebate. The Windows Mobile 6.1 device has many of the same great features as its CDMA cousin, but also offers some design tweaks and AT&T services. But is it worth $300?

Features

The HTC Fuze for AT&T is built for the power business user and ships with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition. It offers the standard core applications like the Microsoft Office Mobile Suite and comes with several personal information management tools, such as Adobe Reader, Sprite Backup, Remote Desktop, a Zip manager, a voice recorder, a task list, and more.

The Fuze supports a number of e-mail solutions, including Microsoft Exchange Server, AT&T Xpress Mail, and BlackBerry Connect. You can also access POP3 and IMAP accounts, and there are three instant messaging clients preloaded on the device: AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger.

The Fuze’s phone features include quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, and voice commands and dialing, and text and multimedia messaging. The address book is limited only by the available memory (the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts). Each contact can hold multiple numbers, e-mail addresses, for a single entry as well as home and work addresses, an e-mail address, an IM screen name, birthday, spouse’s name, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can pair a contact with a photo, a caller group, or one of 59 polyphonic ringtones.

The Fuze also supports AT&T’s push-to-talk service and Video Share service. PTT lets you instantly see the availability of your contacts before calling them and make individual or group PTT calls, while Video Share lets you to make video calls. Plans for Video Share start at $4.99 per month while PTT plans start at $9.99 per month.

The HTC Fuze is also a tri-band UMTS/HSDPA smartphone. It’s important to remember that there are multiple factors that affect 3G speeds, such as where you live and how many people are on the network on one time, but you can expect speeds around 1.4Mbps (with the potential to hit up to 2Mbps). Since the Fuze is a tri-band (850/1900/2100), you’ll be able to access 3G networks while abroad as well.

The HTC Fuze also has integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) so you have another option for getting online. Our review unit had no problem finding and connecting to our wireless network, and like the Sprint HTC Touch Pro, the Fuze, the Touch Pro also ships with the Opera Mobile HTML Web browser (version 9.5) in addition to Internet Explorer Mobile, so you have a choice in mobile browsers.

The smartphone has Bluetooth 2.0 that supports mono- and stereo-Bluetooth headsets, hands-free kits, and dial-up networking. There is no need for accessory Bluetooth GPS receivers since the Fuze already has GPS/A-GPS. This means the smartphone will use both satellites and cellular triangulation to get a fix on your position.

Plus, there’s a utility called QuickGPS installed on the device to speed up the time it takes to find your position by downloading the latest satellite information via an Internet connection. For real-time turn-by-turn text- and voice-guided directions, traffic updates, local search, and more, the Fuze is compatible with AT&T Navigator, which is free for the first 30 days but then costs $9.99 per month for unlimited access or $2.99 per day.

When you’re ready to call it day or take a break, you can use Windows Media Player 10 Mobile to enjoy AAC, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-4, WMV, and more. If you’re looking to discover new music or check out fresh, streaming media, there are shortcuts to AT&T Music and AT&T Video on the HTC Fuze. These add-on services enable you to access content, such as Napster to Go, streaming XM satellite radio, music videos, MusicID for identifying song titles and artist, and video programming from CNN, ESPN, and NBC, among other channels.

The HTC Fuze has a 1,340mAh lithium ion battery, which has a rated talk time battery life of 7.4 hours (6.6 hours on 3G) and up to 15 days of standby time.

And last but not least, we come to the Fuze’s 3.2-megapixel camera. It’s the same as the one found on the HTC Touch Diamond and the Touch Pro,  so you will get a flash, auto-focus, and video recording capabilities.

• HTC Fuze for only $149 at Newegg