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By John Chan
Jan 21, 2008

The HTC Touch's claim to fame is its heavily modified WM (Windows Mobile) interface which makes it more convenient to get basic tasks done. The original Touch has been a hit so far, thanks to its great design and low price, and we won't be surprised if HTC replicates that success in the Touch Dual as well. The third and latest of the series is the Touch Cruise, a handheld which doesn't leave out any connectivity features--a niggling complaint we had when reviewing the first two in the range.

Design

The design of the Touch Cruise isn't quite the same as the others in the Touch series. You could probably liken the HTC Touch and Touch Dual to flattened pebbles because of the generous use of curves around their edges, but this is not the case for the Cruise. In fact, it looks more like the Dopod P800W (also known as the HTC P3300), one of the company's earlier GPS-enabled devices. Given the resemblance, we wouldn't be surprised if the Cruise was meant to be a follow-up to that model but modified to fit into the Touch line of products.

This isn't a negative point, though. Admittedly, the designs of the Touch and Touch Dual PDA-phones are prettier than the Touch Cruise's, but this handheld does have its appeal. The black finish gives it a sophisticated look. The front of the device has a shiny finish around the LCD, while the rest of it comes in a soft touch finish, which makes it feel pretty good in the hands. The Cruise weighs 130g and has dimensions of 110 x 58 x 15.5mm. For comparison's sake, the HTC P3600i weighs more at 150g, has almost the same footprint and is thicker at 18.4mm.

Under the display are your regular Call and Hang up keys as well as two extra shortcut buttons. The directional pad is like a regular one that you can press it to move up, down, left and right and select using the center button. The difference is it's shaped like a wheel and rotates, too. Rotating clockwise is similar to pressing either right or down, and anti-clockwise to left or up. We found using it like a regular D-pad more effective most of the time, but the wheel also came in handy when browsing long Web pages and for zooming in and out of images and maps. When in use, a ring lights up around the selector button inside the wheel.

One more shortcut button and a volume control rocker are found on the left side of the device. On the right are a camera shutter button and the microSD card slot. The single speaker for the Cruise is found on the back. As usual, we would have preferred this to be front facing for better speakerphone/video call quality, but that looks like a design issue not many manufacturers are willing to take up.

Like most of HTC's current crop of devices, the Cruise has only a single mini-USB connector for charging, syncing and connecting a wired headset. While this isn't ideal for situations where you need to charge and use a headset at the same time (a likely scenario in a car using a cigarette lighter charger), it looks like HTC will be sticking with this formula.

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