HTC Touch Cruise review

The Touch Cruise is HTC's latest Windows Mobile smartphone to use the TouchFlo interface, which we saw previously on the Touch and Touch Dual.

It's a higher-specification smartphone than its predecessors, with extras such as a 3-megapixel camera and a built-in GPS receiver.

The Touch Cruise is a stylish phone, with a smart silver front and textured rubber back. The standard Windows Mobile directional keypad has been replaced with a scroll wheel, making it easy to navigate through menu options, lists of contacts and webpages.

The TouchFlo interface is a front end for Windows Mobile rather than a complete replacement. From the home screen, sliding your finger up from the bottom of the screen launches the TouchFlo menu. You can then drag your finger across the screen to flip between contacts, main applications such as email and messaging and multimedia applications such as music, photos and videos. The interface has large buttons, so you can make calls and launch the most common applications without the stylus. You can also scroll around the screen with your finger, as with the iPhone, but the scrolling is jerky and inaccurate.

The main problem with TouchFlo is that it launches standard Windows Mobile applications, which have tiny icons and are impossible to use with your finger. Unlike SPB's Mobile Shell (reviewed opposite) it isn't possible to customise the interface to show the applications you want.

The Touch Cruise has the usual set of Windows Mobile programs. The email application can connect to POP3 and IMAP email servers as well as Microsoft Exchange. As the Cruise has no physical keypad, you have to use an onscreen keyboard. In addition to the tiny Windows Mobile keyboard, there's a 20-key keyboard with two letters per key and a nine-key phone-style keypad for predictive text. Both of these work well enough but are rather sluggish. Windows Mobile's keyboard was the best, but the Touch Dual's physical keypad is easier to use than all of them.

With 3G and HSDPA wireless data and 802.11g wireless networking, the Touch Cruise lets you connect to the internet from almost anywhere. It comes with the Opera web browser, which is faster and better at formatting pages to fit the screen than Pocket Internet Explorer. There's also a trial version of TomTom's Navigator, which lets you download a map of one city for free. We got reasonable photos in daylight from the built-in camera, but there's no LED or flash for photos in dim light.

HTC's Touch Cruise is a powerful Windows Mobile smartphone, but it's expensive even with a mobile phone contract. What's more, the lack of a physical keypad makes text entry considerably more tricky than it is with other models.

Unless you really need built-in GPS, you're better off with the Touch Dual or Palm's non-touch-screen 500v.

Author: Chris Finnamore