HTC Touch Cruise Review
The HTC Touch Cruise is the replacement for the P3300 Artemis. With the Touch Cruise you get some really fantastic features such as a built in GPS that includes TomTom Navigator 6 software, in addition to WiFi, FM radio and a 3-megapixel camera. Another exciting feature of this phone is that you can use it anywhere in the world as it has a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) along with a tri-band UMTS (850/1900/2100 MHz).
With the HTC Touch Cruise you get a classy design and high quality construction. The rich plastic used in the casing not only gives it an attractive finish, but it feels soft and luxurious to touch too. The glass covered 2.8-inch TFT display looks great, but be aware that you will be constantly cleaning fingerprints from the display.
The HTC Touch Cruise comes with Windows Mobile Professional 6.0, as well as several organizing tools such as an address book, alarms, colanders, and more. This phone also comes with a full QWERTY keyboard, which is the fastest and most convenient way to type out messages with a mobile device. You’ll be putting your keyboard to use with the many messaging capabilities of the Touch Cruise; these include SMS, MMS as well as email.
With this smartphone from HTC you can also browse the Internet with mobile Internet Explorer, and Opera 8.65. Most people prefer to use Opera with mobile devices, as it is much faster than Explorer. Another feature of the HTC Touch Cruise is Skype for those that prefer to make their calls this way.
The camera that comes with the Touch Cruise does offer auto focus, but picture quality is very basic. The camera will work well for taking advantage of that unexpected photo moment, but it certainly won’t replace your current digital camera. This is one area where HTC could have improved on by adding a more advanced mobile camera.
No mobile phone of today is complete without multimedia features and you can be sure that HTC has added these to the Touch Cruise. You get a Windows Media player to view video and listen to music. The file formats supported by this player include MPEG4/H.263, WMV and 3GP. Music files supported are MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, AAC+ and AMR-NB.
The main disappointment with the HTC Touch Cruise multimedia features is the sound quality. Due to the fact that the speaker is on the back of the phone, the sound quality suffers.
The HTC Touch Cruise is a fun and stylish phone that offers GPS navigation and great phone call performance, but it does lack a good camera. Aside from this, if you can find a good HTC Touch Cruise deals, this phone would be a great choice.
