HTC TOUCH CRUISE Review

Ever got lost while going somewhere? Then HTC has a solution for your problem. The new HTC Touch Cruise, successor the P3300 Artemis would definitely make you feel like an explorer. Why? Read on to find out.

Lets start with the HTC Touch Cruise’s camera features. The phone comes with a 3 mega pixel which includes autofocus. But don’t get all impressed just yet, because as with all smartphones, the manufacturer didn’t really focus on this feature of the phone. You can take photos of things that you like but the quality isn’t all that great. But still, it is a great feature. It takes about 3 seconds to start the camera and it would take another 2 seconds to focus the camera. The actual taking of the photo including the time to save it would take you another 6-7 seconds. This is considerably good considering that this is not a camera dedicated phone.

You can also record videos with highest possible resolution of 320×240 pixels and depending on the amount of light available the frames per second can go from 4 to 20. The quality is rather low and is more suited for MMS or email.

The HTC Touch Cruise is equipped with the standard Windows Media Player and its main purpose is video playback. The video formats supported MPEG4/H.263, WMV as well as 3GP. As expected the video playback in full screen is good quality and very smooth without any lags in both video and audio. So you’re now perhaps wondering what software in the phone plays music. HTC recommends using their Audio Manager which is intended to be the main music player for the phone. The Audio Manager supports many different audio formats such as; MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, AAC+ as well as AMR-NB file formats. You are also able to sort your files according to artist, album, genre and composer.

Listening to music using the Cruise can be quite tricky. The speakers are on the back of the phone so to be able to listen to the sounds better; you would have to turn the phone around. Besides that, the sound quality is also rather low and increasing the volume would only produce a crackling noise. To avoid hearing that just switch to using the comfortable earphones but again, do not turn up the volume to its maximum. The Audio Booster Option, equalizer, is only available when your phone is plugged in. The same thing goes for the built in tuner since it uses an antenna.

The HTC Touch Cruise also comes with a built-in GPS. The navigation system comes equipped with the TomTom6 navigation program which is quite popular and very useful. The unfortunate thing is that there are no pre-loaded maps. But you are given the option to download a free map for a city of your choosing. After doing that, you also get a discount code for your future purchases but if TomTom6 does not suit your palette, there are many other softwares available such as iGO, Mapopolis, CoPilot Live GPS, Google Navigator and many more.

As for power, the phone is powered by a Li-ion battery hidden under the back lid. It has the same capacity as the TyTN II’s 1350 mAh. It would give you up to 400 hours on standy or an equivalent of at least 7 hours talk time.