Got the all new HTC Touch Cruise for almost week and instead of doing yet another unboxing piece on the phone, I want to look at the phone in another perspective, one from a power user.
As you all remember, I lost my iPhone on Christmas Eve and the one great thing I missed about the iPhone is the ultra-fast user interface and the iPod functions on it as podcasts takes up a big chunk of my daily life. For the month without the iPhone, I have to go back to my HTC Touch, which I found to be sluggish in terms of speed and even with the TouchFlo interface. One thing that I appreciates is having the instant sync capabilities with my Microsoft Exchange account and that is the thing that I truly missed while using the iPhone.
Okay, on to the HTC Touch Cruise. For HK$5,580 (US$715), I bought the HTC Touch Cruise the second day after it was launched. The outlook is sweet, the mirror finish on the surface is stylish and elegant (unlike the HTC Touch’s cheap plastic feel).
The buttons and the jog wheel are very sensitive and gives a good feel when pressing or scrolling. Onto the processor, in terms of speed or movie playback, one can feel the lag, not much, but enough for one to wonder why HTC can’t offer a better processor for this top-notch phone. However, when compare with the HTC Touch, the HTC Touch Cruise is considered much faster and it is acceptable. The second generation TouchFLO is a bit smoother and faster than the previous version and the incorporation of the technology to the picture album is just awesome, I just love how the pictures can be zoomed in and out and rotates.
The phone comes with a FM radio and the headphone, which function also as an antenna, would be needed in order for it to work. However, the radio reception and sound quality of the headphones that came with the phone are just purely unacceptable. Couple posts on the local forums indicated that previous HTC headphones of older phone models (those with the mini-usb jack) gives better radio reception and produce much better sound quality. Another solution is to look for those generic headphones with a mini-usb jack, chances are, they’re still better than the one that came with the phone.
As for the battery, well, disappointing is all I have to say. I can easily half drain the battery (1,350 mAh) within a 24-hour period with no Bluetooth and no WiFi on, 20+ short phone calls, 40+ incoming mail and messages, and without accessing any other programs. Can’t imagine what it would be like if I start listening to music on it or reading my RSS feeds off it.
The 3.0 mega pixels camera is weak, don’t expect to take any great pics off it. However, the VGA CMOS camera on the front gives very crisp picture during the video calls. I tested it with my Motorola and LG video phones and the video quality off the HTC Touch Cruise is very good, not much lag at all.
All in all, the HTC Touch Cruise is a decent upgrade to the HTC Touch (much along the same line as the HTC Touch Dual), but in terms of value for money, I would say not. For almost US$100 more than the HTC Touch Dual, I don’t see much extras the HTC Touch Cruise really had to offer. Of course WiFi, FM radio and video call capabilities are cool to have but only if deemed necessary. If I get to choose again, I might just go for the HTC Touch Dual (that one have a pretty nice keypad).
Check out the following pics for more.
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