HTC Touch Cruise

The HTC Touch Cruise made its debut way back in November 2007, and unfortunately, it never found its way to the United States. However, being a glutton of punishment and out of pure curiosity, we got our hands on an unlocked version of the Windows Mobile 6 smartphone thanks to our friends at eXpansys.com. Belonging to the same family as the HTC Touch and HTC Touch Dual, the Touch Cruise goes beyond the unique TouchFLO interface by adding GPS and TomTom navigation software, making it one of the more powerful GPS-enabled smartphones. That said, we were disappointed to learn that you only get one map free so you'll have to spend extra money if you want to travel beyond one city, and that's on top of the $600 to $700 you'd spend to buy an unlocked version of the phone. Yes, it's a very powerful and well-connected smartphone, but some of its limitations makes it hard to justify spending that much dough, especially when you can find comparable products such as the AT&T Tilt for less.

Design
We had a hard time trying to come up with a description for the HTC Touch Cruise's design. The smartphone isn't ugly, but it's not attractive either. It's not thin, nor is it terribly bulky. The only word that really comes to mind is "meh." The Cruise measures 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. That said, the device is remarkably light and feels compact in the hands. There's also a soft-touch finish on the back.

On front, you'll find a 2.8-inch touch screen with a 65,000-color output and 320x240-pixel resolution. Text and images looked sharp and vibrant, and the touch screen was responsive. Since the smartphone came out before the HTC Touch Diamond, the Cruise uses the original TouchFLO interface found on the HTC Touch and the HTC Touch Dual, rather than the newer 3D interface of the Diamond. The smartphone does feature the roomier 20-key and 12-key QWERTY keyboards that found its way onto the Sprint HTC Touch and Verizon Wireless XV6900, but we still had a hard time composing text messages and e-mails. Rather than small buttons, the more frustrating and time-consuming issue was having to tap multiple times to get the right letter.

Below the display, there are Talk and End keys, a GPS button, a shortcut to Internet Explorer, and a navigation wheel with a center select button. In addition to pressing it up, down, left, and right, you can rotate the wheel clockwise or counterclockwise to move through the menu items. We were initially concerned with the navigation wheel since it felt very loose, but as we used it to navigate through the menus, we found that it has good control.

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.

The HTC Touch Cruise comes packaged with an AC adapter, a USB cable, a wired stereo headset, a soft protective pouch, software CDs, and reference material. The included AC adapter doesn't fit U.S. outlet, so you'll need to get a power adapter. For more add-ons, check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.

Features
One of the main draws of the HTC Touch Cruise is the integrated GPS and TomTom navigation software. The Touch Cruise also has a QuickGPS utility that can help speed up GPS acquisition by downloading the latest satellite data via the Web. Unlike other GPS-enabled smartphones where you have to add third-party software or subscribe to a location-based service, 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. Much to our disappointment, however, you only get one city map free, and then you'll have to pay extra for other regional maps.

For Internet connectivity, you have a couple of options. The Touch Cruise has integrated Wi-Fi and 3G support. To be more specific, the smartphone operates on the UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900MHz bands, which means the 3.5G speeds are only supported on the AT&T network and not T-Mobile's, which uses the 1700/2100MHz bands. That said, you should get data speeds of around 400Kbps to 700Kbps (with the potential to hit up to 2Mbps) using AT&T's network.

The quad-band Touch Cruise does 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, so you won't get some of the new setup features and Internet Explorer enhancements that come with Windows Mobile 6.1. Still, you get the Office Mobile Suite so you can create, view, and edit Word and Excel documents and read PDFs and PowerPoint presentations, as well as 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, but now you can also view e-mails in their original HTML format, regardless of account type.

Other PIM tools include Adobe Reader LE, a calculator, a notepad, an RSS hub, a voice recorder, and a calculator. We should note that, in addition to Internet Explorer Mobile, the HTC Touch Cruise ships with the Opera mobile Web browser. For entertainment, there's Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, which plays AAC, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-4, and WMV files, to name a few. If you own a Slingbox, you can stream your home's TV programming right to your device with SlingPlayer Mobile. The Touch Cruise also has a couple of extras, including an Audio Booster utility and an FM radio (must be used with the included headset). Onboard memory includes 256MB ROM and 128MB DDR SDRAM, with a microSD expansion slot that accepts up to 8GB cards.

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.

Picture quality wasn't all that hot, mostly because it was so difficult to get a clear shot. There's a long shutter delay, and even after keeping our hand steady after the photo was taken, images still came out with a hazy look to them. Recorded video clips were also pretty awful, with washed-out colors and blurriness.

Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900) HTC Touch Cruise in San Francisco using AT&T service and call quality was a bit mixed. On our end, we experienced good call quality. Voices sounded loud and clear, and we had no problems using an airline's voice automated response system. However, our friends reported a bit of crackling and said our voice sounded garbled on a couple of occasions. When we turned on the speakerphone, the results were reversed; callers said we sounded good, while audio was quite weak on our end. We were able to pair the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and the Motorola S9 Active Bluetooth Headphones.

Powered by a 400MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 processor, the Touch Cruise was a fairly responsive device. We definitely didn't experience any of the massive delays of the HTC Touch Diamond, but there was a bit of that typical lag when numerous applications were running. Surfing the Web on the Cruise was good, thanks to the 3.5G speeds and Wi-Fi. Multimedia performance was average. As we've come to expect, music playback sounded flat through the phone's speakers but improved when listened through the earbuds. We watched a couple of WMV clips and found it to be satisfactory in short spurts.

With the help of QuickGPS, the Touch Cruise was able to get a fix on our location in about two minutes. Unfortunately, when we tried to use the TomTom software, we were only able to get North Carolina maps. As we mentioned earlier, you're limited to just one free city map and our review unit already happened to have the region of Charlotte, North Carolina installed on it--not very helpful when you live in San Francisco, Calif. Not wanting to pay extra, we downloaded Google Maps for Mobile. It's not as robust as the TomTom software but managed to get us to our destination, and we found the Cruise did a good job of tracking our position as we moved throughout the city.

The HTC Touch Cruise's 1,350-mAh lithium ion battery has a rated talked time of 7 hours (GSM) or 7 hours (UMTS) and up to 16 days of standby time. We are still conducting our battery drain tests, but we will update this section as soon as we have results.

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