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.
- See more CNET content tagged:
- HTC Touch,
- HTC,
- smart phone,
- GPS,
- TomTom
-
First Look: HTC Touch Cruise -
First Look: Nokia N97 (unlocked) -
News: WWDC 2009: TomTom launches navigation...
HTC Touch Cruise:
