HTC Touch Cruise Smartphone Review

HTC recently announced the launching of the Touch Cruise. But this time around, it comes with better navigation capabilities and a new geo-tagging feature, an idea that HTC played around with but was ridden with bugs So does the new Touch Cruise deliver? Read on.

Compared to the first-gen Touch Cruise, the new one is of a smaller build, and a slim one to boot. But in terms of design, the two look pretty much the same. The new Touch Cruise still has four buttons on the fascia with a navigation wheel surrounding the OK button. But if you haven’t noticed, the screen is smaller; 2.8 inch to be exact. While this may disappoint some HTC fans, the idea behind the new Touch Cruise is its geo-tagging capabilities.

There is one major improvement that HTC has done with the Touch Cruise, that being the Footprints feature. Basically, Footprints allows you to take a picture of a location, and do more with it than what we could before. You can add comments, fill in a description, and even record your voice which is then attached to the image. Not only that, Footprints actually saves the coordinates of the location via GPS, so if you’re back in the location on holiday, you’ll be able to find the place and even recount what happened there.

Spec wise, the second-gen Touch Cruise doesn’t differ much from its earlier model; it runs on a Qualcomm MSM7225 processor with a clockspeed of 528MHz. It does however, have 256MB of RAM and 512 of additional built-in storage. On the downside, since the screen only supports QVGA resolution, it utilises TouchFLO 2D.
As much as I was indifferent, I’d have to say that the Footprints feature is indeed a very useful one. And with an extra microSD slot, one can save many more images and send them to friends who want to travel. But as a general purpose smartphone, some might find its feature a bit lacking. Nevertheless, it does a decent job for midrange phone.