HTC Touch Diamond

The HTC Touch Diamond is the newest addition to the Touch Family comprising of the older HTC Touch and the HTC Touch Cruise.

It replaces the HTC Touch Cruise, which we have reviewed earlier on this blog, as HTC’s flagship model. It directly competes with the hugely popular Apple iPhone and the upcoming iPhone 3G. It is a perfect mixture of power, usability and style.

HTC Touch Diamond Specifications:

• Dimensions: 102 x 51 x 11.3 mm
• Weight: 110 g
• Display: 480 x 640, 2.8“ TFT, 65K Colors
• Camera: 3.15 MP Cam with AF and a VGA cam for video calls
• Chipset: Qualcomm MSM 7201A 528MHz
• Memory: 4GB Internal memory, 192MB RAM, 256MB ROM
• Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WLAN 802.11 b/g
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP
• GPS: GPS Receiver with A-GPS
• OS: Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional

Phone Design:

The HTC Diamond is a very sleek phone with a striking design. It is the slimmest Windows Mobile phone around at 11.5mm. It is very light too, at 110g, compared to the other Bulky PDA phones out there. The screen size however, is the same 2.8” as the older Touch Cruise. It features a brilliant VGA screen supporting resolutions of 480*640 pixels. However it supports just 65K colors compared to the 16M color screens in abundance these days. Nevertheless, the high resolution provides a great picture quality. It has great clarity even in bright sunlight. It has a circular D pad, very similar to the one in the HTC Touch Cruise, which doubles up as a touch sensitive scroll wheel which can be used for zooming images, web pages and navigating through videos.

Along with the D pad, it has four other keys – Home, Back, Answer, Reject. The top of the phone is clean with just a Power button. There is a volume adjustment button on the left while the right side is clean. The bottom of the phone has a mini USB slot for connecting the data cable and headphones. It features a unique magnetic stylus due to which it is pulled into the slot. The back of the phone is beautifully designed, imprinted with fine lines and houses just its 3.15 Mega Pixel Camera. The Touch Diamond is definitely a very beautiful and gorgeous phone.

Operating System and Interface Features:

The Touch Diamond runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and has the new revamped Touch FLO 3D User Interface. It has 4 GB of internal flash memory and runs on a very fast 528 MHZ Processor. It comes equipped with 192MB DDR SDRAM, further blurring the line between PDA’s and Computers, and making Multi-tasking a breeze. It comes with a built in Accelerometer for automatic UI rotation.

The Touch FLO 3D interface’s home screen has several tabs – Home, People, Messages, Mail, Videos, Photos, Music, Settings etc. You can select either of these tabs to access the corresponding features. The Home screen also has a Large Clock placed around the centre of the screen. The Touch FLO 3D interface completely masks Windows Mobile 6.1 for most of the basic functions, so much that you might forget that you are working on a Windows Mobile phone. The Touch FLO 3D environment is a very sleek and impressive one, the animations look superb.

The device comes with all the regular office stuff – Microsoft Office Mobile, Adobe Reader, Flashlite bundled. The Office suite is fully compatible with Microsoft Office 2007. The Diamond is good enough for minimal document editing but the lack of a QWERTY keypad does prove to be a hindrance. The device comes with Java support out of the box.

The HTC Diamond comes with a modified version of Opera Mobile 9.5 powered by the Presto engine. It offers a fantastic, fullscreen browsing experience. There is absolutely no lag in page rendering and zooming. The browser switches to landscape mode automatically when held horizontally. Browsing is a joy, thanks to the Multi touch capabilities. It also supports tabbed browsing. It is easily among the best mobile browsers, second maybe, only to mobile Safari on the iPhone.

Multimedia:

The Touch Diamond comes with a 3.15 MP camera with autofocus. The camera takes decent, crisp and non-blurry pictures with accurate color representation. However, the lack of a flash means slightly shabby pictures in low-light conditions. You can play with quite a few settings like white balance, brightness and select different modes to get that almost perfect picture.

Videos can be recorded in MPEG4 and H263 in CIF (352*288) resolutions. The device also has a front facing VGA video camera for video conferencing and the likes. Touch FLO 3D includes a custom music player and gallery viewer which are used if the multimedia files are opened through Music, Videos or Photos tabs on the home screen. If the media files are opened through the default Windows Mobile File explorer, the files play in Windows Media Player. Videos play in the landscape mode, full screen, and look great on the 2.8” VGA screen. The Music player supports Album Art as well.

The Touch Diamond supports FM Radio with RDS support to display Song information dynamically. The FM reception is crisp. However, the HTC Diamond doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack – a negative for audiophiles. The bundled ear phones are connected through the mini USB slot. The quality of the bundled earphones is good enough for most of us.

A dedicated YouTube player is also bundled to watch videos on the online video sharing giant.

Phone Performance:

The HTC Touch Diamond offers decent reception even in low network areas. The speakerphone is clear but not very loud. The battery life is less, just 5.5 hours of talktime, due to the 900mAH battery included. Considering the processor and display requirements, they should have packed in a more powerful battery. The battery can easily last a day though, in case of moderate usage.

Pros:

• Small, Light-weight
• Stylish Design
• The new improved TouchFLO 3D UI is refined, much more responsive and nearly matches that of the iPhone.
• The brilliant VGA screen

Cons:

• No QWERTY Keypad
• The TouchFLO 3D UI is slightly laggy
• No Flash
• No 3.5mm jack
• Slightly Expensive

Final Conclusions:
The HTC Touch Diamond is a very powerful phone that easily combines usability with style. Frankly, the HTC Touch Diamond is the best Windows Mobile phone we have seen. It is nearly worthy of its price, though a lower price would have made this phone irresistible. This phone trumps the iPhone and its other opponents in terms of features and rules the current mobile phone arena. The upcoming Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and its own brother, the HTC Touch PRO may challenge its position soon. Its list of Pros far outweigh the Cons.

This phone gets a 9/10

HTC Touch Cruise

HTC released its latest Pocket PC ie. HTC Touch Cruise some time ago and it surely is a big improvement over HTC Touch that I reviewed on this blog some time ago. The Cruise also has better looks to go along with all the power that HTC has bestowed upon it! This one also has the revolutionary Touch-FLO interface but an improved version. It certainly will give other Pocket PCs a run for their money.

HTC Touch Cruise specifications:

• Dimensions : 110 x 58 x 15.5 mm
• Weight : 130 g
• Display : 2.8″ 65k color, 240 x 320
• 128MB RAM, 256MB ROM
• GPRS, EDGE, 3G
• WiFi 802.11b/g
• Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP
• 3.15 MP camera
• Built-in GPS receiver
• Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional
• Approx. Price: $700

Design and Display

The HTC Touch is one of the sleekest Pocket PCs in the market at just 15.5 mm. At 130 g it will hardly make your pocket heavier. The secondary camera is located on the top right side on the display and the earpiece has two LEDs attached to its edges which are used for giving the status of Bluetooth,WiFi and the battery. Below the big 2.8″ display are the regular Call and End keys along with the four navigation keys. HTC has also given preference to GPS and Internet Explorer by providing dedicated launch keys to them which are right below the Call/End keys.

The retail package is decent but it was surprising not to find a microSD card in it.It had all the regulars such as the charger, miniUSB cable, carrying pouch and the spare stylus which was pretty much expected. The screen protector and manuals complete the rest of package.

Coming to the display, the 2.8″ display is good but far from best. 65K colors is another deterrent along with the fingerprint prone screen. The visibility under sunlight is low. The display quality is good and brightness level is good. The display could have been better and HTC needs to look at it in its next device.

Camera and Media Player

The HTC Touch Cruise comes with a surprise : A 3.15 MP camera which is a rarity to be seen on Pocket PCs. But since they are becoming the norm HTC seems to have realised that and gone ahead and integrated one in the Cruise.It is a pleasure to use the camera coupled with a 2.8″ viewfinder and gives you the feel of a digital camera but sadly same is not the case with performance. The camera has autofocus and also a macro mode. The interface can be operated through your fingers itself. You get quite a few settings to customise yourself such as white balance,color effects,various modes etc. The camera also has a Panaroma mode but its ability is limited to VGA resolution.The picture quality is average most of the times and certainly not at par with other 3 MP cameras we have seen in Nokia or SE counterparts. The video quality is also average.

Customary to Windows Mobile devices, Windows Media Player is the default audio/video player on the device. It can also stream TV if you like. Media management isn’t an issue at all and your collection stays well organised all the time. Apart from WMP, HTC has also included a Audio Manager music player which I didn’t find any better than WMP. The video playback of VGA resolution movies results in a lot-of dropped frames. QVGA resolution movies played smoothly though. Looks like HTC needs to seriously look at tweaking hardware to gain maximum performance out of the processor.The audio quality is good enough for casual listening.

Windows Mobile OS and Web Browser

Windows Mobile 6 Professional is the OS on the HTC Touch Cruise and it has been in business for quite some time now.Nothing path-breaking but a simple and user-friendly interface is what you get with this OS.There are many pre-installed applications with the OS which are very useful. In the Cruise you also find that the Home tab has five separate tabs for five separate applications. The Home screen has the usual other parameters like the signal strength,battery level which are always on display. The OS is strong at multi-tasking and also offers support for third party applications.

Touch FLO gets improved in the Cruise and is more fun to work with.It makes navigation more easy and takes you away from using stylus all the time. The sensitivity has definitely improved and Cruise can detect commands more swiftly. Touch FLO is definitely one of the best features of the Cruise.

The Cruise has both the Internet Explorer and the Opera Mobile browsers installed which eliminates the need to install any other browser on the device. The display makes the browsing experience rich and when you have good browsers at your dispense it only gets better. Opera Mobile is faster at rendering pages and also has couple of more features up its sleeve.

Pros:

• Light and sleek
• 3 Megapixel camera
• WiFi and GPS support
• Enhanced Touch FLO
• Great browsing experience
• Good battery life

Cons:

• Display could have been better
• Video playback at VGA is choppy
• Average image quality

Final Thoughts

HTC Touch Cruise is definitely one of the best Pocket PCs in the market and is worth the money.Although there are some issues with it but that should matter to business users who will mostly be the ones using it.It is definitely a step-up from HTC Touch.

My Rating : 4/5

Top 10 Mobiles

Cellphones are released everyday but only few survive the fight to live long in the hands of the consumer! There have been many exciting cellphones that have been released off-late that not only take functionality to a new level but also add a lot of glamor to one’s personality. I have reviewed the best cellphones across various categories and I will list them all here to help you compare them and help you make your decision easier!

1. Nokia N95 8GB

The complete multimedia device with all the looks that money can buy! It has everything ranging from 5 megapixel camera to 8GB internal memory. The phones excels at imaging and multimedia tasks and the big 2.8″ screen is sheer pleasure to work with . WiFi,GPS,3G, this phone has it all. The phone is a fast performer and has all the ingredients that make it a ‘mini-computer’.

2. Nokia N82

The Nokia N82 is a bar phone and is very much similar to the N95, but it has a few more tricks up its sleeve. The phone is a first from Nokia to feature Xenon flash which delivers amazing performance in night shots and can be considered as a replacement to entry level digital cameras in the market.Average looks do not go well with its personality but that will change when the all black Nokia N82 comes out soon.

3. Sony Ericsson W960

This one is revolutionary phone from Sony Ericsson and has loads of features starting from touchscreen to a 3.2 megapixel camera. The device excels at playing music as well as taking great images.8GB internal memory is an added advantage along with integration of WiFi. All in all it is great device and being Symbian it will attract lot of Nokia users also.

4. LG Viewty KU990

A LG phone made it to the list! The phone takes the imaging in cellphones to a new era with support for VGA recording at 30fps which is really cool and the images taken are also amazing. The interface on the phone is flash based and different from the rest and is operated through the stylus or your fingers. TV-out support also comes with this cellphone. A ‘different’ phone that sets it apart from the crowd.

5. Sony Ericsson P1i

P1i is an excellent offering from Sony Ericsson in the PDA department. Sony Ericsson has always come out with great Pocket PC devices and here is yet another example. The device manages to get almost all the things right. A 3.2 megapixel camera does a good job at imaging but lacks in the video department. Handwriting recognition , Symbian UIQ 9.1 OS , WiFi are some of the nifty features of the P1i. It is one the best Pocket PC devices and absolutely worth buying.

6. Apple iPhone

Apple has done a remarkably good job on its first cellphone it introduced in the market. The device has generated a lot of hype and interest all over the word and selective availability has resulted in ‘unlocked’ versions selling all over the world. A lot has changed with the device after a series of firmware upgrades and various annoying restrictions were removed. But what set the nail on the head was the announcement of the iPhone-SDK that sets the path for development of 3rd party Apps on the device which will take the experience to a new level. All of you would already know about its features like Multi-Touch, huge 3.5″ display, accelerometer etc. It is the device with the highest flaunt value and increasing functionality!

7. HTC Touch Cruise

A strong competitor to the Sony Ericsson Pi1 , the phone is an improved version of the HTC Touch which had a few drawbacks. TouchFLO interface is fun to work with and makes navigation easier. Camera quality is not a strong point of the phone and display also could have been a bit better. Otherwise there are no drawbacks with this device and performs all the tasks a PocketPC can with utter smoothness.

8. Nokia N81 8GB

This device is aimed at music lovers who do not want to compromise on music quality. Apart from being a music phone the N81 is also a gaming device and belongs to the Nokia N-Gage gaming platform. The display is breathtaking and will leave you spellbound. NaviWheel is another great invention by Nokia. Inbuilt 8GB memory will never hurt. Bulky weight and average keypad are its only deterrents.

9. Sony Ericsson K850i

Sony Ericsson has done a great job by integrating almost a lot of features in this phone. Although the display is not big but you get a plethora of features like GPRS,EDGE,3G, 5 megapixel camera with xenon flash,motion sensor etc. WiFi is one thing which you will miss in this phone.Motion sensor is a cool feature aka. accelerometer of iPhone. The 5 megapixel camera with xenon flash paves the way for great imaging experience. Sound quality is another strong point. Only if it has symbian!

10. Sony Ericsson W910

Looks are of prime importance with this phone. Big display, good keypad, extremely thin, new Walkman 3.0 player are some of the positive points of this phone. Camera is not a strong point of this phone.The speakers are pretty loud and ShakeControl and ShakeMe are excellent additions. The phone also comes with a good accessory bundle. There are other phones with better functionality but they don’t look as sexy as W910!

HTC Touch

PocketPC devices based on mportant;">Windows Mobile have stormed the market recently and they are available is all shapes and sizes. HTC has been producing amazing devices based on this platform which are very affordable too.HTC Touch aims to redefine them with a new navigation mportant;">system and other cool features.

HTC Touch specifications:

• Dimensions: 99.9 x 58 x 13.9 mm
• Weight : 112 gms
• 2.8″ TFT touchscreen with 240 x 320 resolution
• Handwriting recognition
• GPRS,EDGE,WiFi,mportant;">Bluetooth
• 2 MP Camera

The small dimensions of the HTC Touch earn it the tag of world’s smallest PocketPC. With the device weighing just 112 gms you won’t be able to realize its presence in your pocket. The rounded edges give it a “cute” look and holding the device is also a bit easier.It is powered by a 201 MHz mportant;">processor coupled with 64MB of mportant;">RAM and 128MB of ROM.

Display and TouchFLO

HTC Touch has a huge 2.8″ QVGA resolution TFT screen which takes up most of the space on the front leaving enough for the D-Pad.The visibility of the screen is good enough in sunlight but the screen tends to catch fingerprints making it smudgy at times.The screen is at par with other PocketPC devices and 65K does not make much of a difference.

TouchFLO is a much talked about feature of the HTC Touch.Although it is not a replacement for the mportant;">stylus but it creates a completely new dimension to navigation in PocketPC devices.Working with the TouchFLO cube is fun and accomplish many tasks.It reinvents the joy of working on a PocketPC and will give other manufacturers a food for thought.

Multimedia and Camera

The mportant;">Windows Media Player that is standard on the mportant;">Windows Mobile Platform is used for playing all the multimedia files. You can also watch TV or stream video using it.The library management is good as is with WMP.Additionally you can find Audio manager that can also be used to organize your music collection.The processor is the bottleneck to playing video files and HTC needs to think on that in its future devices.

Camera isn’t anything much to talk about as it is an under performer and disappoints.The lack of autofocus makes the pictures blurry. The menu navigation is easy and operatable through fingers.There are manual settings also at your disposable but the camera is just not good enough to utilize them to full effect.Video recording at 10fps and QCIF resolution seems to be native to previous generation phones.

Web browser and Organizer

mportant;">Internet Explorer is the default web browser as HTC did not bundle any other mportant;">web browser. IE is average at its best and I would recommend installing some third party web browser like Opera to get a rich browsing experience. Basic features like fullscreen mode,landscape mode are available and you can also fit the website to the screen but that is pretty much it.

Organizer can perform all the tasks be it from creating a to-do list,scheduling multiple alarms,creating notes,scribbling down notes in your own handwriting,voice recording,performing calculations. All the tasks are available at your expense.The search mportant;">application gives good results.MSN Live is now standard on WM 6.0 Platform.Other applications include Office Mobile,mportant;">Outlook,Adobe Reader, mportant;">Zip manager.

Pros:

• Small dimensions
• TouchFLO
• Good organizer

Cons:

• No 3G
• Poor processor
• Screen prone to fingerprints
• Lack of FM radio
• Below average camera

Final Thoughts

Being the sleekest PcoketPC it is a first choice for many.Apart from TouchFLO and good organiser there is not much to talk about the phone based on Windows Mobile 6.0 Platform. I feel it does not manage to utilize the full power of the platform.Slow processor and bad camera are some of major drawbacks of this phone.I would not recommend buying it unless you are happy after trying it out.There are better devices in the market but they don’t come as cheap as HTC Touch too!