HTC Touch Cruise Review

Performance:

To cut to the chase, the Cruise is one of the best performing phones we’ve encountered.  Sound quality was phenomenal, and callers rated us “close to a 10,” saying it was “possibly the best we’ve ever sounded.”  On our end they sounded nearly as good, though just a bit soft.  In a quiet room they were plenty loud, but if there is significant background noise callers may be faint.  Nevertheless, we were extremely pleased with the results.

It is rated for 6.7 hours of talk time in GSM mode and 6.25 in 3G, both more than respectable.  Data and multimedia usage will of course affect this rating, so individual usage patterns may produce drastically different results.  In our testing we were quite pleased.  We used the GPS and internet quite a bit and noticed minimal battery drain.  The Cruise has plenty of power, with a 528mHz processor, 256MB of RAM and 512MB of ROM, nearly the same amount of memory found in the Touch Pro.


Conclusion:

There are a lot of things to like about this new Touch Cruise.  It may not be the flashiest device HTC offers, but it more than makes up for it with solid all-around performance.  The integration of GPS services is slick; TomTom is one of the best navigation suites out there and Footprints will certainly appeal to users.  TouchFLO 2D is as fast as ever, and the addition of Map Search makes it even more useful.  Performance was among the best we’ve ever seen, with excellent call quality and top notch battery life.  HTC has put together a very compelling package with the Cruise, and even though it doesn’t have the VGA screen of its big brothers it fits into the Touch family quite nicely.