Nokia N97 Mini vs HTC Touch Cruise 09-Battle of the strongest contenders

HTC is a Taiwan based company that mainly manufactures Microsoft Windows Mobile and Google Android based devices. Apart from manufacturing self-branded products they also support operator branded products and also manufacture original equipment. The HTC Touch Cruise 09 is the second phone with the “Touch Cruise” branding in HTC's line up. The original Touch Cruise was released way back in 2007 while the slimmer and sleeker Touch Cruise 09 was released earlier this year. This one is a Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone and it comes with a 2.8 inches TFT resistive touchscreen of 65 K colours. HTC has integrated the TouchFLO finger swipe navigation in this phone along with a smart hand-writing recognition feature. Nokia is the largest mobile phone maker in the world with a global market share of about 38%.

They produce mobile phones for all segments starting from economic and durable phones to high end smart-phones. The Nokia N97 Mini is a miniature version of the N97, one of the most powerful touchscreen devices. The N97 mini comes with a smaller screen and weighs lesser that the original N97 which was a bulky ensemble. It's 3.2 inches TFT resistive touchscreen with 16M colours comes bigger than the display of the Touch Cruise 09. This is a Symbian S60 device and comes with a full QWERTY keypad in a side-sliding mechanism. Although there are many inherent differences when compared, both the phones mentioned above are very evolved devices and come along with a host and applications that make them really versatile. The N97 Mini has a quad-band GSM reception along with quad-band 3G service support while the Touch Cruise 09 is a quad-band GSM unit with only dual band 3G support. The N97 Mini comes with Class32 GPRS and EDGE while those available with the Touch Cruise 09 are of only Class10 efficiency. But the latter has a higher HSDPA rate at 7.2 Mbps as compared to the 3.2 available with the N97 Mini. The Touch Cruise 09 also seems to be equipped with a better processor and a bigger RAM. Both the devices are Wi-Fi enabled that allows them to access any local area network. The N97 Mini comes with a better and more efficient phone camera with a 5 mega pixel sensor and optics from Carl Zeiss.

It also has an auto-focus feature for faster focusing along with dual LED flash and an additional video light. Video can be recorded @30fps in the VGA mode. On the other hand the camera in the Touch Cruise 09 is a 3.15 mega pixel unit with not much additional features. Although it has video recording capability in decent quality. Both the devices also come with very versatile media players that support and playback different file formats. In addition the N97 Mini also comes with a stereo FM radio with RDS and Visual radio support. Some of the features are commonly available in the Nokia N97 Mini and the HTC Touch Cruise 09. Like Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF), GPS receiver with A-GPS support, Email, IM, Bluetooth and USB. The Touch Cruise 09 is definitely lighter and cheaper than the other, but misses a few of the goodies. However both are powered by comparable standard battery that give a talk time of around 6 hours and a standby time of over 300 hours._