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
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