HTC Touch Cruise 09 (HTC Iolite)

Discontinued
22nd January 2009

It's one of the oddest sounding phones that we know of: the HTC Touch Cruise 09. This is the second phone in HTC's line-up to feature the "Touch Cruise" name, the original version (perhaps it should be called the HTC Touch Cruise 07?) was a clunky looking device, but the Touch Cruise 09 is significantly sleeker and more elegant.

Mobile Gazette readers may recognise the Touch Cruise 09 as O2 announced it late last year under the name O2 XDA Guide. This particular phone is also known as the HTC Iolite, which was its codename during development.

What we have here is a compact Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone with a 2.8" 240 x 320 pixel touch-sensitive display, HSDPA and UMTS support with a maximum download speed of 7.2 Mbps, WiFi, built-in GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera, microSD expandable memory and Bluetooth.

The "Cruise" part of the name relates to the phone's A-GPS receiver. Although you can use the Touch Cruise 09 with your favourite personal navigation software, it also comes with something called "HTC Footprints". Footprints works by allowing users to take a "digital postcard" comprising of a photograph, audio clips and accompanying text which is then geo-tagged with the location. Not only does the geo-tagging include the GPS coordinates, but the Touch Cruise 09 also looks up the name of the location and stores it.

The GPS unit can then trace your way back to when the postcard was saved, which is something that seems to be unique to HTC Footprints. Another interesting feature is that the geo-tagging works indoors as well as outdoors, which other devices struggle to manage.

Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional comes with all the usual software that you would expect, plus HTC's TouchFLO interface which makes it a much nicer experience.

Considering how much technology is in the Touch Cruise 09, the phone itself it a relatively lightweight handset weighing just 103 grams. Inside is a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor with a useful 256 MB RAM. Talktime is a maximum of 6 hours with up to 14 days standby time.

HTC say that the Touch Cruise 09 should be available sometime during the Northern Hemisphere's spring. Bearing in mind that the O2 version of this is due in February, we suspect that the HTC version may be out in early March.

HTC have a couple of demonstration videos here and here.