HTC/Qtek Cruise

Pocket PCs have been keeping us busy these days. Just as we gave you LG KS20, it's time for our one-on-one with the HTC Touch Cruise. And hey, are those workhorses getting sexier or what. As one of our readers sharply observed, those devices just don't have to yell corporate or geek any more. One of the best looking Pocket PCs around, the HTC Touch Cruise will surely turn heads. Besides, its feature set is on par with the attire, which explains our eagerness to put it through its paces. Wi-Fi, HSDPA, 2.8" Touchscreen display and a 3 megapixel camera surely make it one of the most loaded devices around. And, not least, we just couldn't wait to rev up the new TouchFLO.

Pocket PCs have been keeping us busy these days. Just as we gave you LG KS20, it's time for our one-on-one with the HTC Touch Cruise. And hey, are those workhorses getting sexier or what. As one of our readers sharply observed, those devices just don't have to yell corporate or geek any more. One of the best looking Pocket PCs around, the HTC Touch Cruise will surely turn heads. Besides, its feature set is on par with the attire, which explains our eagerness to put it through its paces. Wi-Fi, HSDPA, 2.8" Touchscreen display and a 3 megapixel camera surely make it one of the most loaded devices around. And, not least, we just couldn't wait to rev up the new TouchFLO.

Design
HTC Touch Cruise is very wierdly built. And that’s not the matter of design itself; it is just the one you may dislike. The succession of models is more important, for the novelty looks exactly like P3300 and the absence of screen-to-edge transition makes it allied to Touch. As a result the device combines the tendencies of the company’s two bestsellers. The admirers of either will find something in this model, that fact helps reach maximal coverage. As for Cruise design, smooth surface of the face panel looks disputable - it makes the device more easily soiled and less solid. The latter is particularly critical for a high price range. However, this moment is subjective, we shall not pronounce sentences here, everyone will decide it for himself.

Soft-touch is employed everywhere except for the face panel, the side edges have glossy inserts. The casing is completely made out of plastic, that’s not to top product’s advantage. However the quality is high – it doesn’t creak at squeezing at all, the back panel doesn’t play. The coating is wear-resistant, for a month of active work it got neither worn nor scratched. The same concerns the smooth face panel, that’s why it cannot be considered absolutely unsuccessful. According to popularity of this tendency among ordinary phones (smooth panel models are produced by Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and others) there is quite a number of them.

As it was already mentioned the model enjoys moderately small dimensions, that’s why it sits in hand rather comfortably. The ExtUSB slot is put on the bottom edge unlike with Dual (which had it on the left edge of the body) it is way more convenient - nothing interferes when the headset is plugged in. By illustrations one can think that the navigation block is touch-sensitive, but it is not so – the stylization deceives (as with 8800 Arte). The keys are ordinary with a good stroke but they are only four in number, HTC refused the habitual OK and Start. The loss is minor (when desired the keys can be reassigned) as well as concerning the RollR trackball replacement by the ordinary key in comparison with P3300. The scroll wheel became more convenient and reminds of a similar solution with Samsung, it is especially useful at web-pages scrolling - to some extent it is an equivalent to TyTN II side element. The binding of this element to HTC gallery zoom management pleased, it is really simple and convenient.

Above the screen there is a front VGA-camera for video telephony and a speaker with two indicators. The left burns green, yellow and red - a signal, an event and a charge. The right - blue, green and yellow - Bt, Wi-Fi and GPS. The system is rather consistent though sometimes not too obvious - the same Gigabyte realized it in i350 much more successfully, the indicators are more noticeable. A new implementation of the memory expansion slot is a serious step forward in comparison with P3300 and Touch; it keeps with the highest of standards allowing the long-expected hot swapping support. It’s simply wonderful that the HTC guys were smart enough to notice the awkwardness of the side piece hosting expansion and SIM card slots in the earlier Touch model. An under-battery microSD "geography" like with Artemis is a history now.

The power button blocks the keypad just like it used to, which is rather convenient. Besides, multimedia accessories appear gradually that makes Cruise attractive to music fans as well. In November a 3.5 mm adapter will be available as an option and in December - a quality set with the control unit on a wire and a 3.5 mm output on it. It will cost about 40 euros and the adapter will go for about 15 euros. Running a few steps forward let’s note that the Cruise speaker’s maximal volume (as well as that of Dual) is a little bit higher than with Touch and P3300; the audio section is of high quality, even the volume does not let down, there is no problem with Bluetooth (A2DP) as well.

The Touch Cruise device offers the user a unique software solution for data input - the trademark virtual keyboard , being an alternative to the regular keyboard. Unlike the standard Windows Mobile keyboard, it supports stylusless text input - as long as you have at least one finger, you’ll be fine with it. It’s not a critical point though; it allows using keypad without opening the device. The solution could have looked much more reasonable as a part of the original Touch device, but it is better late, than never. Especially since nothing prevents you from installing it on the original of a series.

A significant improvement over touch is the heavily updated TouchFLO. Now the system behaves in a much more correct way, even an inexperienced user can easily handle the 3D HTC interface - unlike the earlier models that could confuse the novice. A number of software additions took place; we’ll dwell upon it in a more detailed way in the following part of the article. There’s the temptation to compare the device to iPhone, but there’s still the huge difference in the concept, design and dimensions, Touch Cruiser being much smaller.

Let’s dwell in detail upon the arrangement of control elements. The upper part hosts the power button and the bottom edge - the ‘ear’ used to fasten the wrist band, the interface slot (ExtUSB), the stylus holder and a soft-reset socket as well. The two-position camera button is located on the right edge of the handset’s body and so does the memory expansion slot (microSD), the left edge hosts the sound volume slide button and the voice control key. The SIM card slot (unlike with Touch) is hidden under the battery cover, but that doesn’t pose any real trouble since you have to turn the phone off anyway.

Display
The screen is powered by the TFT technology, its diagonal is 2,8’’ and the resolution is 320x240 quite in accordance with the QVGA standard. The color depth is 65K colors, a solution typical of Window Mobile, the screen diagonal is on a level with Touch, and exceeds Dual’s 2,6’’. The image quality is high, yet the maximum brightness is not as high as one might want. The image dearness is better in comparison with the Artemis, the view angles are much better.

User interface
Unlike the TyTN II model, Touch Cruise enjoys a full-fledged TouchFLO support, including a 3D interface - the same with Touch, but boosted with a number of minor improvements and addition - almost the same with Touch Dual.

The virtual control block looks like a prism that can be rotated by moving the finger sideways, each of its facets acting as customizable quick call shortcuts - contacts (up to 9 frequently called ones can be associated with them), multimedia folders (music, photo, video), PIM functions. It’s hard to say how actually convenient this weird thingie is, but it goes without saying it does look cool.

In comparison with the original Touch, in Touch Cruise (as well as in Dual) this function has undergone a noticeable amount of changes towards a better ergonomics. Additional functions like quick activation of the status line were added, - with a single slight move of the finger you can call up the status line. The Start menu can be made larger so it would take more screen space and, accordingly, be easier to operate with finger strokes. Contact book filtering has been improved by adding an alphabetical list to the right side of the screen.

The upper line is used for displaying service indicators like the battery life meter or signal quality, the clock and the telecom protocols availability, Bluetooth visibility, GPRS/EDGE availability in the area, 3G, Wi-Fi, a list of launched application. The lower line contains info about context button functions. The main part of the desktop can be varied to your liking. By default it shows current day, the service provider info, the owner personal data, messaging stats, the tasklist and schedule, and the indicator area (battery charge, display angle, wireless module manager and backlighting level). The user can customize the order in which these fields follow or remove some of them from the screen completely. Today Desktop can feature a custom picture or a photo.

The extended functionality of HTC Home comes in handy. That's the brand Today screen which offers short stats. It shows the time and three sections showing new messages and missed calls, favorite contacts, weather, launcher and ringtone settings. The lower part hosts the instrument panel which allows switching between the two components.

Contact management

The Windows Mobile OS has an unlimited contact list with a vast number of available fields for each entry. Synchronization with MS Outlook is simply seamless. There is also a letter-by-letter search available in the phonebook so you're not going to get lost even if you had hundreds of contacts.Sending and receiving messages is done through the centralized Inbox. It has separate folders for SMS, MMS and email. SMS length is virtually unlimited, as well as the memory available for received and sent messages. Inside the multimedia editor you will find the useful option to create multi-page messages containing more than one slide with a melody, image or text of your choice.

The Outlook Mobile email client supports POP3 and IMAP accounts. You can have multiple accounts and you can set the client to do automatic checks in regular time intervals. It has full support for sending and receiving attachments. There is also support for Direct Push.What Direct Push support basically means is that instead of checking mail at regular intervals, your messages are delivered to you immediately once they are received by the mail server. The only condition is that your company's Microsoft Exchange server supports Direct Push. Windows Mobile 6.0 offers some upgrades to the email client over Windows Mobile 5.0 - now you have integrated search, plus support for HTML emails.

There are several text input methods with the HTC Touch Cruise, all of them based on typing on the screen. The classical on-screen QWERTY keyboard is available and there is also handwriting recognition. The Block Recognizer allows handwriting with single-stroke characters and gestures, so you have to learn how to write that way (writing is done in a special on-screen box). The Letter Recognizer offers a more natural way to write, as you can input normal characters (writing again is done in a special box). With Transcriber you can write wherever you want on the screen in whatever style you may wish.There are also two virtual keypads available to the Touch Cruise's users designed by HTC themselves. One is a 12-key phone-like layout, the other is an implementation of the RIM's SureType, with 2 letters per each key in a QWERTY layout. These are quite convenient to use with the keys large enough to be easily hit with either a finger or a stylus.

File explorer
The built-in file manager of the HTC Touch Cruise is the standard Windows Mobile variety. It does a good job finding the files you are looking for. The File explorer as the application is called, can create new folders, copy and move files, set tracks as ringtones or simply send files to other devices.

The Picture gallery of Windows Mobile is an application called Pictures&Videos and, as the name implies, you use it to browse the multimedia files in question. As far as pictures are concerned, you can zoom in and out, as well as preview them in landscape mode. The files are shown as either thumbnails or as a plain list. There's a shortcut that allows you to turn on the camera directly from this application. You can even do some basic editing on the images.
"...However HTC Touch Cruise has a second and much improved picture gallery. It is accessible through the TouchFLO cube and supports various gesture controls. It allows natural controlling of the pictures with various gestures acting as commands for zooming in and out, panning and changing the currently selected picture..." 

However HTC Touch Cruise has a second and much improved picture gallery. It is accessible through the TouchFLO cube and supports various gesture controls. It allows natural controlling of the pictures with various gestures acting as commands for zooming in and out, panning and changing the currently selected picture. The Navigation wheel can also show its full potential here. It too can be used for zooming in and out, as well as for changing pictures and panning. Not a bad effort at all and here is a small video showing the tricks this HTC can pull.

Multimedia
HTC Touch Cruise is compatible with the following graphic file formats: *.bmp, *.jpg, *.gif, *.png. A simple Photo Manager is preinstalled to help the user make simple changes to the files, like rotation or trimming.

It does better at handling audio and video files:

The selected media file can be sent by e-mail, transferred to another devices, played as a sliede show, sent to a person through the Windows Live MySpace network and so on. The preinstalled Windows Media Player Mobile allows for executing video and audio records, both local and networks playback is possible. The three main display windows are:

Playback control keys (Play, Pause, Next, Previous and Volume) and the video window.
The playlist.
The media library that stores playlists as well.

An alternative shell for music playback - the Audio Manager. There are main categories used for filtering files here - song title, performer, album and so on. You can compose your own playlists and load them in the Music Player. You can launch an auto search for any music files like MP3, WMA, AAC or AAC+ both in the user memory and on the memory card.

Before setting an MP3 song as the ringtone, you can trim the track and shrink the file size. The MP3 Cutter is just what helps you to do that. Streaming Multimedia allows for 3GP and MP4 files to be played. It also handles SDP (or Session Description Protocol) files. In addition to that, Internet Explorer can be used to open web-pages that employ RTSP-links (or Real Time Streaming Protocol) and host streaming media content. The voice recorder serves, quite expectedly, for talk recording. The records can be further sent via MMS or e-mail, or transferred through a wireless connection. Recorded fragments can also be used as ringtones. The records are stored in the AMR-NB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband) format. The default save location is the My Voice Records folder.

An important improvement with Touch Cruise over the predecessors (except for Dual) is the photo and video gallery. It’s not the dull WM application found with other devices (and looking hopelessly inferior as compared to trademark dedicated applications used in other platforms), but a very handy and nicely looking file manager with an adjustable slide show. This reminds of latest Samsung handsets, and the G600 model in particular. The highlighted file is marked among the rest of the files by a larger icon in a frame. Both horizontal and vertical browsing is supported in any of the view modes. A quick menu is available, granting quick access to the most important functions like delete, Send, etc. The smartest part of the application is the perfectly customizable slide show that also allows applying some special effects to the images being displayed; slide frequency and orientation can be customized as well. A repeat option is also present. These features are quite new to WM, default applications found with other models only dispose a very modest range of visualization settings.

The Audio Assistant applications added acts as an enhanced equalizer which allows for bass and tremble adjustment, as well as surround sound adjustment. The sound section is of high quality, but the headset bundled leaves much to be desired.

GPS navigation

The HTC Touch Cruise gets its name from the built-in GPS and navigation software. It goes without saying that the handset also supports Assisted GPS. It uses the QuickGPS application that comes preinstalled to download initial positioning data, which the GPS receiver can later use for quicker acquisition of satellite lock. The integrated Qualcomm gpsOne chipset is not as efficient as the SIRFStar III-based receivers we've used, but it's still good enough and perfectly adequate to cope with the most common tasks. HSDPA makes map downloading a matter of only seconds, so there is no chance you will end up in uncharted territory. The Touch Cruise offers TomTom navigation software prebundled and one free map to go with it. Additional maps you will have to purchase separately. You can also choose alternative navigation software. We installed iGo and Google Maps and they both worked like a charm. In GPS mode, the battery of the HTC Touch Cruise lasted about 3.5 hours of continuous use.

Organizer

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and, as we already mentioned, all easy to synchronize with MS Outlook. The Calendar is improved in comparison to the one used in Windows Mobile 5, as now it allows searching for events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly and yearly views and you can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends form the Calendar if you use the device for business purposes only. The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. There is also a voice recorder that can be easily started by pressing and holding the dedicated key.

The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. As a frequently used feature, Microsoft should have put more effort into making the alarm clock better. Instead, it's hardly accessible, buried deep down in the Settings menu and not very user friendly. As a whole, this is probably the department where we felt installing a third party application is a must. There really are some better solutions than the Microsoft offer. The other interesting applications that come with the HTC Touch Cruise are the Office Mobile, ZIP manager, the Windows Live service and the Search application. The Office Mobile features support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office files, while the ZIP manager adds support for archived files. The big absence here is the PDF reader, which you will need to install yourselves if you are to use it.

The WorldCard Mobile is a business card scanning application preinstalled for you by HTC. It uses the camera to capture the business card and then does its character-recognition trickery to eventually return all contact details on the card ready for saving. Well, this type of applications is not news anymore and as a matter of fact the one on the Touch Cruise is not nearly the most reliable around. The one saw on the Samsung U600 easily outperforms it.

The Search application is rather useful, as it searches throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in places you need. Windows Mobile 6 integrates Windows Live, which replaces the MSN search and messenger, which we know from previous versions. You can also download the application Live Search for free, that works great with or without the integrated GPS receiver. With it you can find information on local businesses, restaurants, places of interest and even gas prices (the service is currently available only to US and UK). It has nice support for speaker-independent voice recognition that you can use to do your searches.

Games

A Windows Mobile device is a rather versatile gaming platform thanks to the widely-available third-party developed games. Beside Java you also get the games developed natively for Windows Mobile. There is an enormous number of games you can download for you HTC Touch Cruise. These can be played with either the stylus or the keys, or even you finger. However if you rely on the content you get right out of the box, you will have to make do with only the default Windows Mobile games: Bubble Breaker and Solitaire. Neither is much of an offer really.

Conclusion

HTC Touch Cruise will find quite a number of fans, offering a load of features matched by compact size and stand-out styling. Besides, the touchscreen experience is only second to Apple iPhone, which is a good enough premise for some serious market success. The well performing GPS receiver and the good battery life will also attract users who like to travel a lot. The display issues and the photo imaging shortfalls are of course to be reckoned with, but they don't seem make-or-break in the Pocket PC niche.

HTC Touch Cruise is probably one of the most pleasant to work with Windows Mobile devices ever. The enhanced TouchFLO does make a difference, the friendly feel and stylish exterior undoubted strong points too. The Touch Cruise joins the TyTN II as the HTC portfolio headliners and the two feature-packed performers basically raise a fundamental question: hardware keyboard or not. The slightly more expensive TyTN comes with full QWERTY keyboard and tri-band HSDPA. So basically it all boils down to picking your priorities.