Fuzed Up

• Speed:  HTC really tweaked this release.  Everything is faster and much snappier.  The original firmware on the phone was pretty laggy, but I didn't realize how laggy until I upgraded.  Opera used to take a long time to load (I'd say 30-45 seconds).  Now, it is instantaneous.  Sending pictures from the Album application was a test of patience, now it is not too bad (though still slow).  TouchFlo3D is now very smooth.  Menus and windows now pop up instantaneous.  Screen rotation is also much faster.
• Opera:  I used to dread using Opera because it was so slow.  It was slow to rotate.  It was slow to launch.  It was slow to load pages after clicking links.  Worse, if I left it running in the background, eventually it would slow the phone to a crawl.  Now, that has all changed.  Everything is faster, a lot faster.
• Slide-to-Answer:  The original firmware had a "Answer" and "Ignore" button pop up onscreen when a call came in.  Now, they switched to a slider -- a nicer designed slider than the iPhone's.  On the iPhone you slide to answer -- left to right.  On the Fuze, the slider is in the middle.  You slide left to answer.  You slide right to ignore.  Nice.
• Push-to-Talk Button:  The Push-to-Talk button is finally reassignable without having to hack around on the phone.
• GPS Performance:  The GPS functionality of the old firmware was horrible.  It took minutes to get an A-GPS lock (ie. from cell towers).  Then, it took a few more minutes to get GPS satellite locks.  For this reason, I hardly used my location-based applications like Live and Google Maps.  With the new firmware, A-GPS lock takes seconds, then GPS satellite locks take a few seconds more.  GPS has become a lot more useful.