I have had a HTC Touch Cruise for about 6 months now. It is a very nice phone with GPS, turn by turn software, wi-fi, camera, expandable memory and more, and I have been fairly happy with it. The HTC UI certainly masked the underlying Windows Mobile 6.0 OS, with a more finger friendly UI. With this UI, you could swipe to view different “sides of a cube,and this was pretty cool.
A few months after this was released, HTC released another phone called the Touch Diamond. This had a lot of the features of the Touch Cruise, but looked a bit better. What was a lot better was the UI. They totally reworked the UI to be far more finger friendly. They also released a ROM upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.1.
Soon after this, HTC released a ROM upgrade to Windows 6.1 to the all geographies except Australia. This really dissapointed me. And I was starting to notice the deficiencies of the SPB shell, which was starting to make the device a bit unstable.
So I started hunting around for alternatives. In my travels I stumbled across the xda-developers site, which hosts a number of forums dedicated to various HTC phones. I started browsing the HTC Polaris forum (Polaris is the HTC name for the Touch Cruise), and was immediately lost. So I gave up for a while.
Recently though, I was getting more frustrated with the device,and was really hunting for a fix to the phone keypad. The one annoying feature of the phone keypad is that there is a 1/2 second delay between pressing the number on the screen and the tone sounding and the number appearing on the screen, and also looking for a Windows Mobile 6.1 ROM. During my hunting, I became intrigued by the prospect of installing a new ROM, and started hunting for a Windows Mobile 6.1 ROM. I read a *lot* of forum posts before I made the decision to install a new ROM.
So with my courage held in my hand, I found a download for the World Wide English version of the ROM, and tentatively started flashing the ROM. My heart skipped a beat when during the initial flash stages, it errored. Having bricked a motherboard doing just this ort of thing a few months back, I hastily restarted the process and thankfully it worked.
I was impressed by the new ROM and the few new features that Windows 6.1 brought.
But I was not totally satisfied. During my research, I became even more intrigued by “cooked” ROM’s. I settled on a ROM by Itje called a M2D 3.6 ROM. This ROM seems to be a dump of the Touch Diamond ROM and ported to the Touch Cruise. I bit the bullet and installed it and man, was I impressed. One of the things that the guys on the xda-developers site have done is to implement a new graphics drivers (which HTC seemed less than enthusiastic in fixing) which really made the device sing. What was a usable but sluggish UI, became a very fast, fluid UI that to me rivaled the iPhone for fluidity.
After a day or so I started to notice a few issues with the ROM, so decided to attempt another ROM. I settled on a ROM by M-Amine. Well, I was even more impressed with this ROM. It finally made the device truly usable. All my apps still worked (including my copy of Copilot Live).
The only issue I seem to have had so far is with the Daylight Savings time. Since I am in Brisbane, and we are a bit behind the times, we do not observe Daylight Savings. However, Windows Mobile 6.1 and Outlook 2007 seem to have trouble with it. My calendar times were out by an hour, the time would always be wrong. I found a fix online that required a registry hack on the device, and this seems to have worked a treat. (The fix can be found here)
The final bit of goodness for me, was the accidental discovery of how to stop the phone keypad from delaying showing the pressed numbers on the screen. I simply turned of the keypad tones.
So I now have a device that is a great business tool now. It is also a fun tool (I really really like the Weather widget: If the forecast is for rain, the weather pane shows drops falling on the screen, with a windscreen wiper to clear it. Not terribly useful, but cool nonetheless.) Also, the inclusion of a You Tube App, and a Google Maps Search applet really makes this ROM a very nice one. One other benefit I have found is better reception and battery life.