First Location-centric Phone Coming from HTC
Yesterday, HTC announced that they will be bringing us the Touch Cruise, the first location-centric smartphone, onto the market in Q2 of 2009.
The primary value proposition and differentiator from other smartphones is its HTC Footprints™, which is a software on the device that can “record every adventure in precise and vivid detail – down to the exact coordinate” so it can capture your life’s special moment.
The HTC Touch Cruise basically allows you to record your routes, geo-tags and annotate your pictures (both written and voice), and it can also provide you with turn-by-turn navigation. You can see a demo of it in the video below. The Touch Cruise is a Windows Mobile 6.1 based device.
The Footprints application is an interesting idea, there are two major problems. The first one is that it remains to be seen whether most people will put in so much effort in annotating, tagging and organizing their digital assets. Heck, when was last time you even tag your photos? The second problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any service that supports sharing of what’s been recorded on Footprints. Nonetheless, we applaud HTC for being the first to make location such a prominent part of this device.
HTC may be the most important smartphone maker that you have never heard of. They are a Taiwanese company, and they are the largest Windows Mobile device manufacturer, though they haven’t branded their phones with HTC until the last couple of years. Not only are they the top Windows Mobile device maker, they also made the first Google Android G1 phone, and it is widely believed that they will be the manufacturer behind the Palm Pre.
For official HTC Touch Cruise product site, click here.
