The well-designed HTC Touch Diamond boasts a crisp touchscreen, a solid media player and great call quality. But there are several drawbacks to this sequel to the HTC Touch. Read DigitalJournal.com’s review to find out if this smartphone is for you.
Digital Journal — Call these past few months the “smartphone summer.” Thanks to the arrival of the iPhone, Samsung Instinct and BlackBerry Bold, cellphone followers are bombarded with choice. And now another arrival to Canada, via Telus Mobility, is elbowing into the market with the clamour of “Me too, me too!” The HTC Touch Diamond touched down in Canada recently (and 30 other markets, excluding the U.S.), and DigitalJournal.com got our hands on it to give you a thorough look into the phone’s design, features, and performance.
Design
The HTC Touch Diamond improves on its predecessor — the HTC Touch Pro — by offering a sleek mirrored face and a compact design. It is light and easy to slip into any pocket. The hallmark feature is the beautiful 2.8-inch, 680×480 pixel resolution touchscreen, rivalling any other smartphone’s screen in clarity and crispness.
Below the display are some tactile controls, such as the Home button, a directional keypad, a back button, and Talk and End keys. The directional keypad works nicely as the shoot button for the camera, and supposedly it allows zoom control but I didn’t get that to work.
The main misstep in design is foregoing a 3.5mm headphone jack, offering only a USB headphone jack. You have to use their crappy headphones, instead of those great Koss headphones you bought awhile ago. I understand HTC wants to keep the peripherals in the family, but they have to realize the importance of flexibility in the cellphone market.
And one of the biggest head-scratching moments came when I checked out the back of the phone. Yes, I saw the 3.2-megapixel camera there but where was the prism-like diamond design the company touted? It was simply a flat back, hardly living up to its name. This is kind of like the cubic zirconia ripoff scheme.
Features
Running on the latest Windows Mobile 6.1 software, the Diamond loads with the TouchFLO 3D interface. Thing is, it loads slowly — in our tests, the Diamond took 63 seconds to start up, while my Motorola Razr took 20 seconds and my colleague’s iPhone 3G took 25 seconds. So if you need to make a quick phone call and the Diamond is off, don’t expect instant access.
The phone features Microsoft’s Direct Push Technology for real-time email delivery and automatic synching with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server. Setting up the process was simple.
The real appeal of this smartphone is the super-fast HSDPA Internet connectivity, almost up to par with 3G speeds. I was able to surf on the Opera browser without any problems, and most pages loaded quickly. The ones that took the longest (Break.com, for instance) were heavy on multimedia, so it is somewhat understandable that loading time would be sluggish. Using a Wi-Fi connection is quicker than the EDGE network, but both options weren’t too painful.
When inputting text in URL bars or messages, we were frustrated with the keyboard. The Diamond offers a full QWERTY or compact QWERTY interface, and there are drawbacks to both: the full QWERTY is good for those accustomed to BlackBerry’s process, for instance, but it too up too much real estate on the touchscreen. And in the compact QWERTY mode, two letters were dedicated to each button, so to input an “s” you had to hit the button twice. It was a frustrating experience, especially for those of us with man-hands.
Then again, the HTC folks must have foreseen the problem because they included stylus pens in the package. You can use the pens to input text but we still would have liked to just use our fingers for writing in Word, Opera or SMS.
One of the other standout features was the camera. At 3.2 megapixels, the quality was great and it was simple to email photos to friends. Along with 4x zoom, you get a choice of five resolutions and four quality settings, as well as white balance and brightness controls. We were also loving the video recorder (come on, iPhone, get with the program) and found the storage capacity (4GB) decent for the beginner multimedia maven. But too bad there’s no expansion capabilities.
As expected on a 2008 smartphone, the Diamond comes equipped with speakerphone, voice dialing, multimedia messaging, Bluetooth 2.0 support, Internet Explorer Mobile, a YouTube player and integrated GPS. You can also access music tracks and video clips seamlessly.
Performance
Wait, the Diamond is a phone still, right? We tested the call quality and we were told our voices sound crisp and clear. There was no static or fuzziness. The phone felt light in our hand, and touch-dialing contacts worked perfectly.
The touchscreen wowed us with sharp colours, whether on Web pages or in video clips. Using the YouTube player, the videos displayed nicely (such as the Blindness trailer). We were also fans of zooming in on Web pages with a simple double-tap on the touchscreen.
The Diamond supposedly has a talk time of 5.5 hours and up to 11.8 days of standby time. But we found the battery life to be particularly draining during heavy multimedia use, especially when watching videos or listening to music. Speaking of music, the audio came in clearly, but the speaker wasn’t top notch. It’s best to use their headphones to fully enjoy your tracks.
Overall, the HTC Touch Diamond is a stylish function-heavy phone sporting a brilliant touchscreen and strong supporting apps. Using the Diamond requires a bit of a learning curve, especially for compact-QWERTY haters, and the lack of a headphone jack is a poor design idea. And where was the diamond back I expected?
There are problems with the phone, but as one of the more compact smartphones out there, the Diamond is a fantastic device and it will be interesting to see how HTC products rival the highly hyped competitors standing tall in the cellphone industry.
