HTC Touch Diamond Review

Permalink: HTC Touch Diamond Review by Franz Bicar

The HTC Touch Diamond is not the cheapest handheld device in the market. However, it is one of the most well-designed Windows Mobile smart phone out there. Its compact, candy-bar design appeals to a large number of users. The phone measures 4 by 2 inches with its casing as wide as Apple’s iPhone 3G screen. Its not very thin at 0.45 inches but enough to fit snuggly in your pocket.

Casual use lets you realize its handiness. It feels comfortable in your hand and its well-constructed design is an added bonus. The 2.8-inch VGA touch-screen display offered crisp, bright images. The HTC Touch Diamond also has an on-screen software keyboard, however, this feature failed to impress as the screen is a bit small for keyboard input.

The HTC Touch Diamong features the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system. However, you might not be able to notice that at once as many tasks are accomplished through HTC’s custom TouchFLO 3D interface, which puts contacts, text messaging, e-mail, media - video and music, and Internet access at your fingertips.

HTC’s TouchFlo 3D interface is very addictive. As a normal user, you’ll find it very attractive and generally easy to use. One thing that bothers a lot of users are its sometimes sluggish application response. But nevertheless, this technology is already very established and could only get better and better.

Since it is based on Windows Mobile, the Touch includes the full suite of Windows Mobile applications in addition to HTC’s own. While this presents you with two media players and two Web browsers, it also means that the Touch Diamond comes preloaded with quite a bit of software. This includes Outlook Mobile and Office Mobile.

For browsing the Web, you get Internet Explorer Mobile and Opera Mobile. The Opera browser can handle regular Web sites as well as mobile sites–and it can do so over a broadband network or over a Wi-Fi network. But lik

The Touch, again like the iPhone, also has a built-in accelerometer that recognizes the phone’s orientation. This simply means that it can recognize whether the phone is tilted at its side. Screen rotations kick in quickly ones the accelerometer detects a slight change in alignment. This feature comes in handy specially when viewing and browsing photos or the internet.

Considering that the Touch Diamond isn’t played up as a multimedia-centric phone, its multimedia handling is still surprisingly good. The built-in 3.2-megapixel, 2X zoom camera/camcorder yielded pleasing results. Its camera features include auto-focus and white-balance settings, as well as a timer and even a tool to stitch together a panorama. It won’t replace your stand-alone digital camera, but the Touch Diamond’s camera will do a reasonable job in a pinch.

The Touch Diamond also comes with a music player application that supports a number of popular audio formats, including MP3, AAC, and WMA. In addition, it offers its own YouTube application for accessing any YouTube video. The iPhone 3G YourTube application works only with a select subset of videos, however, the Touch’s YouTube app allows you to see every one of them. The phone comes with 4GB of internal memory but lacks the capability for memory expansion.

As one can imagine, since this phone’s screen is much smaller than the ones on other smart phones, its on-screen QWERTY keyboard’s keys are quite small and close together. The Touch Diamond does offer both the on-screen QWERTY keyboard and a roomier 20-key phone keypad layout, which you can switch to on the fly.  The keyboard gives you good visual feedback, but it may take some getting used to.

Sources:
http://www.gsmarena.com
http://www.phonearena.com
http://reviews.cnet.com