HTC Touch Cruise

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Features

As mentioned earlier, the biggest draw of the Touch Cruise is possibly its range of connectivity features. It comes with triband UMTS and quadband GSM, making it good for roaming almost anywhere. Along with that are the usual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless options, common for most mid- to high-end PDA-phones. HSDPA is also enabled in the Cruise, with a maximum theoretical speed of 3.6Mbps.

On the modified Home screen is a handy weather update feature--for those who hate to look out of the window.

GPS is also a standard feature on the Cruise. This further supports our notion that it's a successor to the Dopod P800W or HTC P3300. We tried out the GPS feature using Google Maps and MapKing. Though it doesn't use the SiRFstar III GPS chipset (one of the most popular chips well-known for its capabilities), the Cruise did well to locate our position and track changes. It also helped that HTC provided an application, QuickGPS, which downloads latest satellite data using an active Internet connection to help the GPS get an initial lock faster. Aside from using the internal antenna, there is also a connector behind the Cruise which allows you to plug in an external GPS antenna.

Another wireless feature HTC has included in the Cruise is an FM tuner. As with FM tuners on mobile phones, you need to plug in a wired headset which acts as an antenna. That means you can't use a regular set of headphones as the only connector on the Cruise is a mini-USB one. We tried out the radio with the provided wired headset and found the FM reception to be acceptable but not crystal-clear.

As with the Touch Dual, the Cruise comes with HTC's latest revision of the TouchFLO application. This includes the modified Home screen suited for finger tapping, a quick scroll feature for long lists and large buttons for the Start menu. The virtual cube feature has also been implemented, a graphical interface which makes it possible to get to some commonly used items from any screen you happen to be at. In line with all the finger swiping you have to do across and along the screen, the Touch Cruise does not have a raised bezel like most PDA-phones. It is instead flat across the entire front surface.

Other applications included with the Cruise are WorldCard Mobile for scanning namecards, CE-Star for Chinese text input and a custom Task Manager software for quick access to programs running in the background. We do have to say that the inclusion of too many text input methods including two custom HTC ones, Touch Keyboard and Touch Keypad makes the pop-up menu to select the input method you want a little sluggish.

A 3-megapixel camera graces the rear of the Cruise. This comes with autofocus and a preview mirror for self-portraits, but no LED light for night shots. A smaller VGA camera is located above the LCD for video calls.

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