HTC Touch Diamond Review

Great job by HTC in bringing Windows Mobile to the consumer market

If the HTC Touch Diamond is judged as a consumer device, it would fail miserably. That is because the Diamond runs Windows Mobile 6.1 which was never a consumer friendly OS. Many elements of the OS interface appears outdated and it's often confusing to navigate with the tiny menus and cryptic labels.

That being said, HTC had done an admirable job of hiding Windows Mobile with their own UI, TouchFlo3D (which is essentially just a Today-screen plugin). TouchFlo3D allows the user to accessed the most common features of Windows Mobile right from the home screen. And it looks good, too. There are multiple tabs and each has it's own function (ie, Home, People, Messages, Mail, etc). Navigating between the tabs is quick and easy. Just drag the slider, use the left/right buttons, or swipe left/right on screen.

However, users will soon realize that TouchFlo3D is really just a skin and they'll have to face the ugliness of Windows Mobile soon enough. Eg, the calendar application is the default WinMo app that hasn't been updated since the 90s.

It should be pointed out that early ROM builds were extremely unstable because TouchFlo3D used way to much resources. Moving between tabs had a fly-by animation included. This has since been removed in updated ROMs released by HTC and performance was noticeably improved.

192MB of RAM was quite decent at the time of the Diamond's release but it left users yearning for more because of TouchFlo3D's resource demands. It would have fared much better if it had the 288MB of RAM that it's keyboard-equipped cousin, the Touch Pro, has.

The hardware design of the device is quite astonishing. It was and still is one of the most thin and light Windows Mobile smartphones of all time. The 2.6" VGA display was excellent. Text appears crisp and details of high-resolution photos are shown beautifully.

Some negative aspects of the Touch Diamond:
-No flash on the camera.
-No dedicated camera button.
-Left and Right directional keys are difficult to press.
-Hardware keys don't respond as fast as I'd like.
-No expandable memory (although it does have 4GB internal)
-Back battery cover is not flat and scratches easily.
-TouchFlo3D doesn't go deep enough.
-Performance could be improved, especially with TouchFlo3D enabled.

Conclusion: Windows Mobile offers the most features out of all smartphone platforms. But it's not the easiest to use. This device is for the advanced user. It finally lets the WinMo users show off their phones without feeling geeky about it.