HTC Touch Cruise – A phone for deep pockets

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Comes with a 2 GB card which has US maps, has a 3.2 mega pixel camera, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G support.

Thumbs Down:

You get very little space on the bundled memory card because it is mostly hogged by the maps, the virtual keyboard is cramped.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: GPS, camera, music player

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

2.8 inch touch screen display of HTC Touch Cruise has resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. The supported audio formats are eAAC+, AAC +, MIDI, WMA, WAV, QCP, MP3, AMR, AAC. It has a 3.2 mega pixel camera. The phone comes preinstalled with Pocket Office which contains PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, Word.

The Touch Cruise has 128 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM and comes with a 2 GB memory card. The handset runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional and the phone is powered by Qualcomm MSM 7200 400 MHz processor. For messaging there is Instant Messaging, Email, MMS, SMS. 1,100mAh lithium ion battery has a rated talk time of 6.6 hours and the standby time is 13 days for GSM. With 3G, the rated talk time is 6.25 hours and standby time is 16 days.

Razzle Dazzle:

HTC Touch Cruise has been revamped and thankfully it is lighter as compared to its predecessor. This device is 0.5 inches thick, 2.1 inches wide, 4 inches tall and weighs about 3.6 ounces. The rounded edges and the updated look make the phone very sexy.

Inside Dope:

Tom Cruise? Nope, it is Touch Cruise, a GPS smartphone from HTC. It has a 2.8 inches display which gives a resolution of 320×240 pixels or 65k colors. The display is bright but isn’t as good as HTC Diamond. The LCD tends to go blank when seen in bright sunlight. We had problems checking out maps when in the car and had to turn to voice based directions for help. If the display was a bit bigger, it would have been better for map viewing. Just like other HTC phones, this model too has TouchFlo 3D which lets you browser through applications like e-mail, Web browser, multimedia and contacts. This handset is GPS-centric and hence comes with Map search and geotagging app.

You get a lot of options for entering text – full QWERTY, compact QWERTY, Block Recognizer, phone keypad, etc. The built in accelerometer turns the orientation of the keyboard when you tilt the phone. We mostly used the phone in landscape mode but found that the keys were cramped and it was not as easy to use. A bigger screen would really have been more helpful. On the bright side, the phone comes with a stylus which makes things a bit easier.

Below the screen, there are a few buttons which make up the navigation array. They include Footprints and CoPilot shortcuts, talk and end key and navigation wheel with OK button in the center. The wheel is similar to what we had in the original Touch Cruise, there are four direction buttons and wheel can be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise to move through the icons.

On the left side of the phone, there is a volume rocker which is thin but still easy to use during calls. On the bottom, there is a miniUSB port for headset and power charging. A non-standard jack for headphones is quite annoying and we would like HTC to give us 3.5 mm headset jack.

The phone comes with reference manual, software disc, vehicle mount, protective pouch, wired headset, 2 gig microSD card (which comes preloaded with maps), USB cord and AC power adapter.

HTC Touch Cruise has a phonebook that is only limited by the memory space. A single entry can take multiple numbers, spouse’s name, birthday, IM screen name, e-mail, work and home address, etc. The handset supports photo caller ID, custom ringtone and grouping of contacts. Bluetooth 2.0 lets you use stereo and mono Bluetooth headsets, dial-up networking, file transfer, object push and hands-free kits. Other features on the phone include multimedia and text messaging, three-way calling, voice commands, smart dialing, speed dial, speakerphone and quad band world roaming.

HTC Touch Cruise runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition so you get the same e-mailing capabilities and productivity suite. There are a few goodies bundled in like MP3 Trimmer for creating custom ringtones, dedicated YouTube application, and Opera mobile Web browser.

The highlight of the phone is the handset’s GPS capabilities. For Europe, HTC has TomTom’s navigation software and for the North American version, you get CoPilot Live, which is also as good as the former. User interface of CoPilot Live is both attractive and intuitive. The icons on the menu pages are large so it won’t be much of a problem reading them. The application offers voice and text based directions. 3D and 2D map view, might and day map colors, support for multidestination trips and detour routing. It also has points of interest database which includes various places that are frequently searched. For example, if you type “pizza” you get various pizza outlets in your area.

Touch Cruise comes with a 3.2 mega pixel camera and the quality of the photos is strictly OK. The standard camera options are all there like picture qualities, brightness and white balance controls, effects, etc. The camera can also record videos. The camera doesn’t have flash but you can fiddle with the white balance settings to get better pictures. Lack of dedicated camera button really make it hard to take steady pictures because you have to resort to the on-screen touch button. Footprints application lets you geotag your photos.

For storing pictures and videos, HTC ships a 2 gig memory card along with the handset but most of it is occupied by the maps. We appreciate that HTC has given US maps, previous model gave us just one map for free and we had to pay for additional regions. But you get only 846 MB of user accessible memory. Of course, you can swap cards when you are not using the maps but it is still annoying especially with the card slot located under the battery cover. Onboard memory is 256 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM.

When we tested the Touch Cruise for call quality, we found it to be quite decent. Our conversations were clear but the audio occasionally cut out. We didn’t have any dropped calls but the audio quality did bother us. Our friends didn’t report any such issues; they said they could hear us clearly. Speakerphone calls were not so good, the volume wasn’t too loud and hence talking in noisy conditions was difficult. Bluetooth calls were clear when we paired the device with Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones and Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset.

1,100mAh lithium ion battery has a rated talk time of 6.6 hours and the standby time is 13 days for GSM. With 3G, the rated talk time is 6.25 hours and standby time is 16 days. In our lab tests, the Touch Cruise gave us 9.5 hours of talk time which is really impressive.

Nitty Gritty:

This is a GPS centric smartphone and comes unlocked. If you are willing to spend big, and if you need a GPS phone then this is a good option. But we think this is not so good, the price is a turn off and we will recommend you to look else where.