Going With the Flo

Both the Touch Cruise and the Touch Diamond use a version of HTC's TouchFlo shell interface. The Cruise uses the original version and the Diamond uses TouchFlo 3D. Let's look at what the Cruise's TouchFlo provides and how it differs from the Diamond.

Navigation in TouchFlo is achieved primarily by sliding the highlight over the icons at the bottom of the screen. This moves you between the TouchFlo pages. The soft keys on the menu bar at the bottom are assigned depending on the page displayed. You can also use the directional pad to move between pages.

Figure 8: The main TouchFlo screen gives a summary of important information.

The first screen is TouchFlo's "Today Screen", featuring an analog clock and access to your call history. Tapping on the clock brings up the alarm settings screen. The Call History slot also tells you if you have any missed calls, and tapping it takes you to the Call History screen. Beneath Call History are 2 additional slots. One or both of these slots can be used to display calendar events. Tapping on a slot with a calendar entry will take you into the default calendar.

Figure 9: The screen adapts to accommodate more data.

Figure 9 shows how the display changes as more information is available. Here there's a missed call. There's also a voicemail waiting, and that's displayed in the second slot, pushing the calendar down to the 3rd slot. Tapping the voicemail notification dials your voice mail number.

The Home page is very similar in appearance and functionality on both HTC phones. The Diamond uses a different style clock ("analog" digits, like the old style alarm clocks that flip through the numbers) and you can slide up with your finger to display a smaller clock and add another calendar slot, features not provided with the Cruise.

Figure 10: I hate it when your friends put you in the middle...

Next is the People page. You set up a contact as a favorite for it to appear on this page. If there's a photo assigned to that contact, it's displayed, otherwise a default silhouette image is used. Tapping on the image for the contact takes you to a call screen for that contact, which includes items for contacting the person based on the types of contact points provided (e.g. home, mobile, text message, e-mail, etc.).

The Diamond's People page is quite different… in place of the rows of images for the contacts, it provides a Rolodex-style animation with the images of the contact and you flip through them one by one by flicking your thumb up or down the screen.

Figure 11: The Cruise adds a little flair to your messages.

The next page is for Mail, specifically e-mail. By default, the most recently received e-mail message is displayed, but you can flick back and forth through the messages with your thumb. Tapping on the message displays it in the standard WM Inbox application. Each page provides the ability to go directly to a blank message in Inbox; you can also go to the Inbox message list view. The Messages page provides similar functionality for SMS text messages.

The functionality of these 2 pages is nearly identical to that of the Diamond. The only real difference is that the Diamond has different selections listed on the menus and those selections are larger and more "finger friendly".

Figure 12: Build a travelogue on the go...

The next page is titled Footprints. This is an interesting application that allows you to take photos of places that you visit and store them together with information about those places. You can use the Cruise's built-in GPS receiver to determine and store the location of the item with the photo. You can categorize the photo, find it on Google Maps and add a voice recording with additional information. This can be used to create a travelogue of a vacation, for example. This application is unique to the Cruise… nothing like it is provided for the Diamond.

Figure 13: Opera Mobile and YouTube are just a tap away.

Next is the Internet page. By tapping on the globe, the default browser (Opera Mobile 9.5) will be launched. Additionally, you can scroll down on the page to find your favorites and go directly to those pages in Opera. There's also a link to an application that can be used to search for and play YouTube videos. Functionality here is identical to that of the Diamond.