Pocket PC’s have enjoyed something of a renaissance lately thanks to the emergence of more and more innovative products from Hong Kongs HTC, which has finally emerged from the shadows of its subsidiary companies I-Mate, XDA and SPV to establish themselves as the dominant manufacturer of smartphones on the planet.

The Touch range has done more than its fair share in forcing this turn in events thanks to its innovative TouchFLO interface which allows easier controlling of the menu system with fingers and has proved to be second only to the iPhone for user-interactivity.

With the Touch Cruise, HTC have now extended their reach into the as-yet unfulfilled satellite navigation market. Although HTC have been down this route before with the Artemis range, the Touch Cruise is looking like the more feasible option thanks to the combination of the improvements to the interface from the original Touch and the TomTom Navigator 6 software which also comes with one free city map of your choice.

As far as build-quality goes, the Touch Cruise (which is also known as the O2 XDA Orbit 2) is by no means top of the tree, its still better than a good percentage of other smartphones, some of which seem particularly fragile.

The minimal controls on the front of only 2 call buttons; a direct GPS key plus an internet explorer button make it clear how much HTC are relying on the TouchFLO navigation as there’s no hardware keyboard either. Thankfully this doesn’t prove to be an issue especially with regards to typing as when any message is created you get the option of either a full-sized onscreen QWERTY keyboard or a standard 12-button layout as seen in a normal mobile phone.

Still keeping on the subject of the touchscreen, the interface has been updated a little to make it much more responsive and now unlike on some of the other Touch devices from HTC, only a small tap on the screen is required to register the action, as opposed to a full press which is in danger of damaging the screen itself. It’s just a shame that the display legibility is a little underwhelming.

In my personal opinion, the only touch-based UI that offers more interactivity than the Touch Cruise is of course the Apple iPhone, which to be honest is in a league of its own in that aspect, but the fact that many people are comparing are making this kind of positive comparison can only be a good thing.

The Touch Cruise comes with a 3.2 Mega Pixel camera which although isn’t going to compete with dedicated cameraphones like the K850i or N95, still manages to come out with decent enough images to make it worthy of mentioning in a positive light.

Overall it’s hard to see what can be said against the Touch Cruise as the sheer wealth & variety of features outweigh any of the minor flaws such as the low display legibility and lack of hardware keyboard.

The UI is great for a Windows Mobile device with the TouchFLO especially being a pleasure to use and the added GPS a major bonus and justification for the approximate £400 price tag. If smartphones are your thing, then the Touch Cruise has to be worth checking out.