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The HTC Touch Cruise was released late last year. It became one of the most popular handsets in the market. So now, I think it’s time for us to take a look at what this device has to offer. The Cruise belonged to the same family as the HTC Touch and HTC Touch Dual, therefore, its easy to conclude that the Cruise will have the same TouchFLO interface with the addition of a GPS and a TomTom navigation software. This makes it one of the more powerful GPS-enabled smartphones.
Design-wise, the Cruise is an average phone. It’s not ugly, but it’s also not that attractive either. The Cruise measures around 4.3 inches high by 2.2 inches wide by 0.6 inch deep and weighs 4.5 ounces. It is slightly on the thick side, and will make for a tight fit in a pants pocket. The phone feels good in the hands, it is light and feels compact when held.
At the front, there is a 2.8-inch touch screen with a 65,000-color output and 320×240-pixel resolution. With this display, the Cruise is able to show vibrant and rich images and texts. The touch screen is also very responsive given that the Cruise came in with HTC’s TouchFLO interface. The phone also features a 20-key and 12-key QWERTY keyboards which is a plus for a phone at this level.
Below the screen, there is the Talk and End keys, a GPS button, a shortcut to Internet Explorer, and a navigation wheel with a center select button. The left side of the smartphone has a volume rocker and a voice recorder button, while there’s a microSD expansion slot, a camera activation/capture button on the right. The power button is located on top of the unit, and the mini USB port is on the bottom. On back, you’ll find the camera lens, self-portrait mirror, and a jack for external GPS antenna.
As mentioned, the Cruise is probably one of the more powerful GPS phone out in the market. This is because of its integrated GPS and TomTom navigation software. That is probably one of the most important feature of this phone. Aside from that, the phone also sports a QuickGPS utility that can help speed up GPS acquisition by downloading the latest satellite data via the Web. The Cruise offers color maps, turn-by-turn driving directions, points of interest search, and other features found on standalone GPS device, right out of the box. If you’ve used any TomTom portable navigation system before, you’ll find the interface to be familiar, but even if this is your first time, the application is pretty easy to use.
For Internet connectivity, you have a couple of options. The Touch Cruise has integrated Wi-Fi and 3G support. The smartphone operates on the UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900MHz bands. The quad-band Touch Cruise also offer world roaming as well as a speakerphone, speed dial, smart dialing, voice commands, three-way calling, call forwarding, and text and multimedia messaging.
The address book is only limited by the available memory, and each entry can store multiple numbers, home and work addresses, e-mail, 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 40 polyphonic ringtones. Bluetooth 2.0 is also onboard for use with support for mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, hands-free kits, serial port, and dial-up networking.
The smartphone runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition. Users also get the Office Mobile Suite so they can create, view, and edit Word and Excel documents and read PDFs and PowerPoint presentations. Other business feature include Microsoft’s Direct Push Technology real-time e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server. For personal e-mail, the smartphone also supports POP3 and IMAP accounts.
For entertainment, there’s Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, which plays AAC, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-4, and WMV files, to name a few. Finally, the Touch Cruise is equipped with a 3-megapixel camera with 4x zoom and video recording capabilities. Still images can be captured in one of three resolutions and one of four picture qualities.
You get standard tools, such as white balance settings, brightness controls, and effects, as well as a self-timer, flicker adjustment, auto focus, and time stamp. In video mode, you have four resolution options and can adjust white balance and brightness.
Sources:
http://www.pocketpc.ch
http://www.coolsmartphone.com
http://www.gsmarena.com
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