Shiny Review: HTC Touch Cruise

The HTC Touch still causes some people in Shiny Towers to give a small orgasmic shudder (disclaimer: this is an exaggeration) and to me nothing could be more perfect that taking a lovely phone and shoving a sat nav in. I'm one of those crazy Londoners with a car, yet have no sense of direction, so this speaks to my heart.

So does the Touch Cruise, formerly known as Polaris, succeed in being the dream phone?

Yes. Then again, no. But still yes. Confused? So was I.

As a phone, the Touch / Tom Cruise - with TomTom software on board, it's an inevitable thought - is pretty good. It's a 3G HSDPA handset with a lovely new on-screen keyboard powered by a very handy and navigable clickwheel, and it does everything else a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone should do. It is a bit chunky, but that can appeal to some.

The clickwheel in particular is genius; you feel much less like you're using a touchscreen when you have a prominent and easy-to-use navigation feature like this. To me, that's a positive addition as it makes you feel there's a backup if the screen is damaged in some way. It's responsive, but not oversensitive, and makes the new on-screen keypad even more of a doddle to use.

So far, so good.

But wait! There are also two cameras, one VGA for video calls and a three megapixel number on the back, an FM radio and microSD memory expansion. Okay, the microSD card is once again hidden under the shiny trim; it has to be levered up with a nail, dangling from a piece of elastic and is therefore really fiddly to access, but at least it's not hidden under the battery as with some phones.

Great. But it's all about the GPS, right?

Well, he's where it's both brilliant and let down by its own ambition. The GPS itself works very well, and although I was, at one point, testing the phone in the centre of an office with no line of sight to the sky, it found me in seconds.

Having downloaded Google's mobile map application, I was zipping around following concise and accurate directions literally in seconds. I tried to download Quick GPS, which apparently speeds this up even further, but after four attempts gave up when it insisted this had "expired". I wouldn't worry about it, though; it really can't get much faster than it already is.

I was quite excited to try out the TomTom software at this point. During set up, which was straightforward, it promised proper satnav things like reading the directions aloud. The screen might be ample, but that would be useful in a car where you can't really squint at a phone. However, it soon transpired that there was no default "voice", but all had to be downloaded from TomTom's website or added from a support disk.

I got a little irritated at this point, but I was willing to keep giving it a chance.

You get one free map of a specific European or US location when you get the phone; further than that, you have to pay for the service. So I tried to download a map of London. Bearing in mind all of Google Maps had taken all of 75 seconds to download, I was expecting this to take maybe two or three minutes.

After ten had passed, I cancelled the download as it appeared to have just stuck a third of the way through.

I tried again. After another ten minutes, I was this time even less far along the progress metre than I had been before. Then the download bombed out.

After a disastrous third attempt, during which the download (though not the connection) once again bombed out, I admitted defeat.

I can't say the TomTom software isn't good, because I couldn't access it! I can say that the HTC Touch Cruise plus Google Maps is a highly usable, attractive combination. I'm hoping that by the time we do a video review of this fine phone, we'll have got the TomTom software working and will be able to give you a demonstration of what it can do if you're lucky / patient, so do watch this space...

Alexandra Roumbas is Deputy Editor of Shiny Shiny. She hates being defeated by technology, and will surely win the war if not the battle.