FOR two weeks, I was in touch with my inner Windows Mobile child, thanks to the HTC Touch Cruise that I was reviewing. I enjoyed the brief fling, and will now think more fondly again of Windows Mobile devices, considering that I haven’t used a Windows-based gadget as my personal phone since my old O2 XDA II.

Here’s a photo of Mikaela, my MacBook Pro (well, the MacBook Pro the office assigned to me, anyway; yeah, I still use Windows on my Mac for some of my tasks via Boot Camp), saying goodbye to the HTC Touch Cruise. It was nice syncing and Bluetoothing with you while it lasted.

The first thing you’ll notice about the HTC Touch Cruise is its sleek design and that big 2.8 inch LCD screen, which is a boon if you’re after multimedia. As the name makes clear, however, this isn’t meant to be ogled, but to be touched. I’ve always gotten a kick out of touchscreen devices (but no, I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch yet, heh), and thanks to my Nintendo DS, which now belongs to my six-year-old daughter Sam, I’m pretty comfy using a stylus as an input device.

The Touch part of this product’s name comes from HTC’s TouchFLO touchscreen technology, which is intended to make it easier for you to manipulate the touchscreen with your fingers, for finger-scrolling for instance. I have to confess though that as someone who suffers from sweaty palms, I still feel more comfortable using the stylus. Plus the circular control wheel was a pretty useful navigation tool. Intuitive, too; just click on the center button to launch the program you’ve chosen. I just hope all the sweat didn’t melt the device’s exterior or innards while I was reviewing this unit.

If you’re someone who always wants to be connected, whether using voice or data — and in this increasingly virtual world, that’s becoming more and more the case — what you’ll really appreciate is the many connectivity options the HTC Touch Cruise provides. It’s a quadband GSM/EDGE/GPRS smart phone. The device offers 3G/3.5G connectivity using UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), if that’s supported by your cellular mobile telecommunications provider. Plus it offers wifi connectivity, which was what I mostly used, though browsing using 3G/HSDPA was also fun — until you get the bill

So as you can see, this wealth of connectivity options is pretty nifty if you’re traveling. Speaking of which, the HTC Touch Cruise is also a GPS (Global Positioning System) device, which I suppose is ideally suited for me, since I think I was sleeping when God was passing around a good direction sense. I’ll confess though that I didn’t play around that much with the GPS, ‘coz I just checked out the included free maps.

The connection manager allows you to, well, manage the different connectivity options, like if you want to turn off wifi. You click on the icon on top of the screen, and it will show you which connection is active and with a click you can access the different connectivity options.

As a Windows Mobile device, naturally Internet Explorer is the bundled browser, but I preferred using Opera Mobile, which is also installed on the HTC Touch Cruise.

I used the HTC Touch Cruise to write a brief blog entry here and embed photos I took of my daughter Sam using the device’s 3-megapixel camera.

You can also take videos with the device, and here’s one I took of Sam and also e-mailed to Photobucket, which converts the video (MP4 is the HTC Touch Cruise’s video format) to FLV. I sent the video to Photobucket rather than using our own INQUIRER.net VDO service ‘coz I wanted to transmit it using the HTC Touch Cruise itself.

By the way, the HTC Touch Cruise has two cameras — the higher-resolution one on the back is for taking photos and videos, and the other one above the LCD screen is used for your video calls.

I just have to note, however, that if taking photos and videos is what you want to do with your phone, you should get a camphone instead of this device. Remember, we have to manage our expectations; the HTC Touch Cruise is a pretty good Pocket PC, but it’s meant to be an all-around device, and this is a gadget that will appeal to business users with its Direct Push Outlook e-mail and Microsoft Office Mobile.

That being said, the HTC Touch Cruise is still impressive on the multimedia front. You’ll enjoy watching movies on this device. Plus it’s an MP3 player and has a built-in FM tuner. So its not all work and no play, Jack. Speaking of which, computing performance is pretty good with the 400MHz Qualcomm processor and 128 of RAM. On-board memory is 256MB, and you can add more memory with the TransFlash/microSD slot.

Is the HTC Touch Cruise for everyone? No; that would be like saying that everyone needs a smart phone, or a BlackBerry. The thing we have to keep in mind, our lust for gadgets notwithstanding, is what we’ll use the device for, because as I realized when I bought Sam a Nokia 1650, you’ll realize just how sluggish a smart phone is when you use a normal cell phone, if all you’re really after is making voice calls and sending text.

But if you want a device that does a lot of things, and a lot of them well, then the HTC Touch Cruise is a good choice for you, if you want multimedia along with business applications.

The only thing is that the new HTC Touch Diamond is now being launched in the Philippines, so as always, something better is arriving. Yup, that’s life, we always want to upgrade

And, see, I got through this review without once mentioning Tom Cruise, because I’m sure the HTC folks are sick by now of Tom Cruise jokes whenever the HTC Touch Cruise is mentioned.

Oh, wait… dang!