HTC Diamond (HTC Touch Diamond)

Member Name: firefox111

Product:	HTC Touch Diamond
Date:	10/10/08 (1923 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Super Slim Sexy and Stylish Great screen nice Touch Flo interface good features

Disadvantages: Can have a bit of a poor battery life, Scratches easily if your not careful

HTC Diamond

Overview
The HTC diamond is one of the latest slimmest Windows mobile pocket pc's available. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Profesional and has the TouchFlo 3D interface. It features a 2.8" 640x480 TFT VGA vibrant colour display.The phone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 MHz processor and features 256 MB ROM, 192 MB DDR SDRAM and 4 GB Internal storage.
The dimensions are Length 102 mm X Width 51 mm X Thickness 11.35 mm
Mini USB connection port/charger, FM Radio

In the box
The box itself is a talking point it's a diamond shaper very well packaged it has a cardboard outer skin with a plastic case inside shaped to to same as the cardboard exterior. The box can be opened on the underside to reveal the package contents held within.

In the box itself you get the HTC Diamond phone (of course), a battery, screen protector, wired stereo headphones, stylus software for the diamond to connect to a windows PC, a mini USB connection lead and manuals and a bit of advertising for additional stuff for the HTC diamond.

Features
Touch sensitive Screen
Touch sensitive navigation
TouchFlo 3D
GPS
A-GPS (gets a quick fix of your GPS co ordinates via the cellular network)
Accelerometer
Bluetooth 2.0
802.11 b/g
3.2 Megapixel colour camera

First Impressions
I have owned windows mobile phones for quite a few years now and to be honest I was like wow that phone is beautiful. You can see that HTC were thinking of style with this baby. It's as light as a feather even with the battery it weight pratically nothing. When I powered it up the phone with a tap on the on/standby/off switch screen its bright crisp and clear busrt into life with the HTC logo. Moving on from this the phone plays a jingle and then proceeds to a bit of setting up and then launches the Touch Flo interface. The stylus sits on the bottom right hand side looking at the front of the diamond. Its magnetic as well so its pretty secure being in there unlike some of the HTC phones before where a good set of styli were the order of the day to replace losses.

About Touch Flo 3D
Why all ths fuss about Touch Flo I hear you ask well to me it's probably one of the best things to happen to the Windows Mobile scene for a few years. Basically it makes the phones fitted with this interface so much easier to use and provide an easy way to navigate to what you want the phone to do.

The Touch Flo on the Diamond is a collection of Tabs that you navigate through by using either your finger or stylus on the screen or the navigation panel on the front of the phone. The default tabs and a bit of info about them are listed below

Home: Well this as you may have guessed navigates you back to the home screen. It displays a clock like I used to have as a kid in the bedroom im not sure of the name but my brother and I always used to call it a flip clock the numbers and hours flip down to reveal the next number. The home page also displays the date mine is currently set for eg Fri 10.10.2008 the alarm status either on/off the call history and the next calendar appointment.

People: This page shows you the peple you have in your contacts that you want displayed on the Touch Flo interface. Its easy to use you just look for the + sign and then select the contact you want and from there you can add a picture. You can do this for a load of entries and to navigate through the roller index you can use you finger, stylus or the navigation panel to remove them as well with the menus displayed at the bottom of the screen. To make a call you select the person in the roller index and then tap the entry picture which then list th enumbers in my case I usually have a home, work, mobile entry etc so I can then select the number I want to call after tapping on the person I want to get in touch with.

Messages: This page is for sending SMS and MMS for those who don't know what they are SMS is a text message MMS is a picture message. It shows the last message received and you can tap this and it lets you send a reply. You can also select a view so you can see the separate conversations you have had and withing these conversations your incoming and outgoing messages.

Mail: This page lets you send and receive emails from you accounts you can set up with my yahoo, sky and MSN email accounts it was pretty easy to do.

Weather: This is a nice tab I really like this one. When you select this tab its shows you the weather. The animations are pretty cool and I found out that on this page is an easter egg (not the chcolate type google "software Easter eggs" you will get the idea of what they are.) that cycles through some of the animations for a demonstration. You can add your location other locations around the world (useful to see if when I jet off for my holidays abroad what the weather will be like when I get there). You can also see a 5 day forecast or connect to a web site to see a more detialed in depth weather report.

Internet: This displays the icon to open the Opera web browser or you can slide your fingers up and down to see your favourite sites press one of these and the Opera browser opens up to do its stuff. A word about the Opera browser it only lets you hve three tabs open at once so you have to plan a bit where you are jumping to and from around the web or you run out of tabs to display the pages in. You can also refresh the page and go back forward through the browsing history - Im sure you get the idea. You can also zoom in on a page by double tapping the screen with either your finger or stylus. On really cool thing here is that if yourun your finger in circles clockwise and anticlockwise around the button in the middle of the navigation panel its zooms in and in small increment/decrements. To select a link you just press it with your finger and it navigates to the new page. The browser is really pretty good I can see flash animations and it also runs Javascript code in fact they look like little minitures of what you see on your computer screen at the moment. You can tilt the phone to switch between landscape and portrait modes (You can see the screen tilted to the side)

Photos and Videos: This is where you put your pictures and videos that you might want to carry around with you. With me its pics of my Korat cat's awwww I hear you say or maybe not and some of me and a Lemur I hung around with for a day (That's another story not for on here). Any way back to the phone the pics are really bright and colourful and you can flick through them using you finger or stylus or the navigation panel. To see them in all their glory you can tap on them and they will display on the screen or you can set a slide show to show your friends etc.

Music: The internal memory on the diamond is 4GB If you have heard that there is a memory card slot on the phone its not true for the HTC diamond Touch there is no external memory slot. I heard that there was plans to put one in the Diamond touch but HTC got rid of if to keep the phone as slim as it is. The HTC Touch Diamond Pro does have a keyboard and a memory slot but that's not the phone im describing here. Back to the music tab this list this displays the Album art for the various abums and songs you have put on you phone with the 4GB memory you can get quite a few MP3's on here. This page is not the best and I hope that the Touch Flo guys n gals sort it out in the next update for the Touch Flo interface.

The major bug here is you cannot use the Touch Flo directly to switch between the albums you have to go song by song so if you are on say Frank Sinatra's Greatest Hits and you want to get to The Spice Girls Spice World or whatever you have to go through the songs one by one. Yup that's right there is no album jump what on earth were they thinking. Anyway you can set playlists and the like. The best way I have found is to use Windows media player to transfer the Songs and Album art to the HTC Diamond it works for me so im happy. I found that when I plug in my headphones that you set the volume with the volume control buttons on the top left had side of the HTC Diamond it jumps the volume in steps of three. I know ive been to a few mosh pits in my youth but the volume even for my ears can be way too loud. The best way to turn the vloume up and down is to use the style or your finger you can set the volume in single bars increase decrease and you will find the correct volume setting eventually tahts right for your ears. There is also an equaliser inside the HTC Diamond called Audio booster you can use to get the desired effect of bass treble etc for your music tastes. The supplied HTC headphones are ok but I should also mention that if you want to say plug in your 3.5mm ipod headphones they won't fit in the HTC Diamond it uses the USB Mini port as the headphone socket. You have to buy a separate adapter to get them to fit. Also which looks like it's an oversight of HTC is ok how do you charge your phone and listen to music at the same time without buying another adapter?

Settings: This is pretty easy you can set things like the background picture of the Home page, wifi and bluetooth on/off, flight mode, volume, and data connections once again you can use your finger or stylus or navigation panel on the phone to navigate round the settings to set them.

Programs:
This tab allows you to add remove programs from a list of ones you might want to launch quite a lot of the time you can add the program icons to little boxes to press and hey presto the program starts up.
One think to note here is that you can talk to your diamond using the voice speed dial tage. It's a small program that you record you voice and assign a number or program you want ot run from it so I can say for example "Word" which starts Pocket Word a little brother of microsoft Word or I can say "Excel" and it starts pocket Excel im sure you get the idea its pretty useful but you can get strange looks from folks at the bus stop if your saying "internet", "email" and the like to your phone :o).

Software
Ok this depends on what network operator you got your phone from mine came with Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Adobe reader, Album, Bluetooth explorer, Calculator, Camera, Comm manager, File manager, FM radio, Getting started, Google Maps (Very cool with the GPS the phone has), Internet sharing, Messenger, Notes, Opera browser, Pictures and videos, RSS Hub, Search, Sim Manager, Streaming media, Tasks, Voice speed dial, Windows media player, You Tube and Zip. As you see there is loads to play around with and if you do decide to go for the diamond get a data package with you cell phone operator you will use it to watch you tube - rss feeds, email and general surfing - Oh y teeter uses the inbuilt accelerometer so you move the ball round by tilting the phone there are more and more programs coming out to use the accelerometer all the time.

Support
This is where the Windows mobile community get major points there are tons and I mean tons of freeware applications and software out there have a search in google for "pocket pc freeware" you will see what I mean. Also check out www.xda-developers.com for all smartphone pocket pc related info have a look at the discussions development going on. I wanted my call history to be on a separate tab in the touch flo and someone had written a program that let me do this so I was very impressed. WARNING watch what you are doing with your phone check out fully you know what you are doing before you change anything via a third part application you could at worse brick you phone.

Making a call
This is pretty straight forward on the navigaton panel you press the phone symbol it starts up a keypad you type a number in and as you type the numbers in the list get shorter until you either see the one you want or typed in the full phone number. Press the phone symbol on the left hand side of the navigation panel and it calls the number. You can use the people tab in the Touch Flo if you have the person added in your favourites. The call quality is pretty good but I think that will depend on your cell phone operator and reception. Overall the reception for the HTC Diamond Touch is ok I don't have many problems with calls breaking up.

Overall
OK this is the hard part so I will break it down into pros and cons. This review was based on the latest ROM available from the HTC site that has been released for Europe. I love my diamond despite its shortfalls. It's a sleek elegent design with a nice interface despite some niggles and shortcoming but doesn't every phone.
The range of software out of the box is pretty good and the Opera internet browser does the job well (remember it's a phone not a laptop or desktop pc) You tube is always good for entertainment which come inbuilt on my phone and google maps gps and the like make it good for use as a navigator in the car (it doesn't give voice directions but you can buy these) or you can install some other gps software - there are free versions out there you just have to spend a bit of time looking for them. Its not and i-phone and I don't want to get into the iphone argument they are both good phones I have seen them both what you want depends on what you require yourself only you can make the decision what you want.

Pros
Very nice and stylish and weighs virtually nothing
It's pretty fast at changing between tabs in the Touch Flo im impressed with what Touch Flo on the HTC Diamond offers.
It's easy to use
Very nice bright touch screen
Great range of software out there
Large community for Windows Mobile resources assitance and help.

Cons
The battery life could be better
If it doesn't come with a screen protector get one ASAP don't risk it - this baby scratches easily
It's a fingerprint magnet
It can get hot at the rear when you use it its not scalding or burning or anything like that - and no is not the battery going to blow up - it's the internal circuitry doing work.

If you do decide to go for the HTC Touch Diamond and your phone seems sluggish don't despair it's probably because you don't have the latest ROM from HTC installed. Don't do this unless you are actually sure of what you are doing and the risks to your phone are you could break it if you don't know what you are doing.

One thing i should also mention is that the Diamond will back up using the software supplied to your Windows PC you can sync your appointments numbers calendar pictures music video emails etc when you charge it from the pc which means you can always have aback up of all the stuff on your phone in case the worse happens

Additional Further information on the HTC Touch Diamond
http://www.htc.com/www/product.aspx?id=46286
http:www.xda-developers.com

Summary: Overall not a bad phone needs some setting up in software to make it better

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