HTC Touch Diamond

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Features

By far the greatest innovation of the Diamond is its TouchFLO 3D interface. A dock at the bottom of the screen divides the Home screen into different sub-menus, the default one showing the clock, call history and upcoming appointments from the calendar. Moving to the right, you get quick access to other commonly used items like quick dial, messages, MP3 player and a settings page. Every item is beautifully rendered with transitional effects. For example, in the text messages section, you can switch between SMSes by swiping up and down with one finger. Words float up or down, displaying also the sender and time of message. To reply, you tap on the body text and the screen will switch to the default Windows Mobile 6.1 threaded SMS interface.

Aside from the "I can't believe it's Windows Mobile" Home screen, the Diamond has a few other useful conveniences. For example, if your phone is keylocked with the screen turned off, pulling out the stylus will turn it on, ready for use. That's quite clever because it's natural to have your phone turned on when you take out the stylus, aside from the times that you merely wanted to use it to scratch your heel without removing your shoes.

Inside the Diamond is an orientation sensor which knows how you are holding the device relative to gravity. One way HTC has put that to good use is when a call comes in while your phone is on a table--you only have to turn the screen face down against the table to mute it. Note though, that this isn't a revolutionary feature as it is found in some Nokia devices like the Sapphire Arte. This sensor also orientates your display when in the browser and works in a bundled game called Teeter which requires you to navigate a steel ball through obstacles into a hole.

Aside from reorienting a page, HTC's custom browser for the Diamond has many other features. Built in cooperation with Opera, this browser renders HTML pages in their entirety, allowing you to zoom in to specific areas when you want to read them. The interface is fingertip-friendly and pages go into full-screen mode by default when they have finished loading. Pages like Gmail work as they would on a desktop browser, which is very impressive. One downside is that HTC has implemented Adobe Flash Lite 2 instead of the latest version 3 in the Diamond, which means that when you visit sites like YouTube and Vimeo, the videos won't appear on the site as Flash Lite 2 doesn't support the FLV format videos used by such sites.

As a workaround, HTC has provided a dedicated YouTube application which allows you to search and view any YouTube clip. This application is very well-designed and we found the video quality to be excellent on the Diamond's VGA display. If you are wondering why you can do this on a dedicated application but not in the browser, it is likely because the YouTube app has its own FLV decoder that doesn't work in the browser. Case in point, Windows Mobile users in the know have been able to stream YouTube videos using the open-source program TCPMP with an FLV plugin for sometime now. Essentially, what HTC has done is to reproduce what TCPMP has been able to do but with a more elegant interface.

The Diamond comes with some custom text input methods including a full onscreen QWERTY keyboard, a phone keypad and a compact QWERTY method which puts two letters on each virtual key. While they are all great alternatives to the default Windows Mobile text input methods, they each take up more than half the screen. This allows for easy finger tapping, but often covers the text field which you are typing into so you can't read what you are keying in. This needs to be addressed in a future update as it can be quite annoying.

Connectivity-wise, this handheld comes with HSDPA which supports transfers up to 7.2Mbps. The Diamond has all the requisite wireless radios like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and also includes GPS for satellite navigation. The processor found in the Diamond is from Qualcomm and has a clock speed of 528MHz. It also has a separate video processor, necessary to render all the fancy graphics in TouchFLO 3D. For that reason also, you won't be seeing this new interface as a firmware upgrade to the regular TouchFLO in older devices like the HTC Touch Dual.

The Diamond comes with 4GB of storage memory aside from its 192MB RAM for running applications and 256MB ROM. There is no expansion slot for your own microSD card, something HTC left out because it would increase the bulk of the device. While some may not like the idea that they can't swap out memory cards, 4GB of internal storage should be sufficient for most users.

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