Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"HTC Touch Cruise will provide a reliable and precise navigation when needed. Aside from that, you will make and receive calls with a very good sound quality, no matter in which country you are. The device can be operated single-handedly -thanks to the TouchFlo 2.0 technology and the rotating 4-way D-pad. In contrast to Artemis, which didn’t have 3G support, Cruise has a tri-band one, meaning that even if you are in an area with no WiFi coverage, you will still be able to reply to an important e mail, for example. If you are on the market for PocketPC with a built-in GPS, take a look at the HTC Touch Cruise, and if not, consider TyTN II from the same manufacturer."



PhoneArena.com takes a look at the Touch Cruise and gives it an "Excellent" rating, with only a few drawbacks like camera quality (so, what else is new?). With quadband GSM, triband HSDPA, GPS, 400MHz processor, a goodly portion of RAM and ROM, the Touch Cruise is a decent alternative if you're not hung up on absolutely having a keyboard. Check out the rest of the review for more details and the awesome photo gallery.

"For those that don’t know, HTC’s "Manilla" [sic] is basically a customized interface that’s on top of the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS. The actual screen shots a good friend provided us with are from a "cooked" X7510 ROM with the "Manilla" part thrown in from an unreleased VGA device HTC is working on. Also we’ve been told that "Manilla" is not technically TouchFLO 2.0, TouchFLO 2.0 just has a few updates to the scrolling part of it and the cube, nothing more than that."



Another interface? So what's new? Well for starters, unlike TouchFlo, the interface covers more applications and not just the Today screen - from the screenshots, it appears all the HTC-developed applications feature the new interface. Dare we hope that this will be the standard interface for the x7510? And that it gets propagated to all other new HTC devices? And somebody hacks it so those of us with "legacy" devices get to enjoy it too?