HTC Touch Diamond

...had my eye on the HTC Touch Diamond for quite a while, so when my contract on Orange ended a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to take the plunge. On several other sites I've seen this phone touted as the iPhone killer - that's a pretty awesome reputation considering how big the iPhone has become, so I must admit to having some high expectations about this phone. Will it live up to them? We'll see...

'''HTC - The Company'''
...trapezium shape, glossy black with HTC branded on the lid. Rather than being made of cardboard, it's made of a thick plastic. Inside the box you'll find:

* The phone itself, with the large screen covered in a plastic film to prevent scratches
* A pair of headphones which connect to the phone's mini USB port
* Two magnetic styli (one for backup, thoughtful!)
* A sticky plastic screen protector
* A CD containing ... more

The iPhone Killer?

I've had my eye on the HTC Touch Diamond for quite a while, so when my contract on Orange ended a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to take the plunge. On several other sites I've seen this phone touted as the iPhone killer - that's a pretty awesome reputation considering how big the iPhone has become, so I must admit to having some high expectations about this phone. Will it live up to them? We'll see...

HTC - The Company

HTC? Who? I'll be honest in saying I hadn't heard of this company before I stumbled across the Touch Diamond on the Orange website. They are, however, much more well known in the US, and the best phone company in the UK to compare them to is probably Blackberry - they sell PDAs and "touch phones" - they are known for high quality products and innovation, aimed towards the high end of the market. There is a range of products under the "Touch" branding - including the Touch Pro (aka Touch Fuse) which is basically the Touch Diamond with a slide out QWERTY keyboard.

The Contract

Previously, I had an 18 month contract on the Dolphin 35 with Orange - 600 minutes and unlimited texts for £35 a month. Upon going to renew as an existing customer, I found Orange had some excellent deals on, leading me to picking up the Dolphin 25 contract (400 minutes, unlimited texts) for just £20 a month for 2 years, with a £30 charge for the phone. New customers on the same contract will be paying £25 a month plus £120 for the phone, and the price of the phone decreases the better the contract you get (it scales to 200 additional minutes for £5 extra a month on Dolphin). Orange don't offer any web browsing bundles on the website, but according to the customer support staff it's £8 a month for unlimited browsing, but I'd check that before you order because no one seemed exactly sure what they could offer!

First Impressions

The Touch Diamond box isn't just a box - it's pretty close to art. It's a sort of 3D trapezium shape, glossy black with HTC branded on the lid. Rather than being made of cardboard, it's made of a thick plastic. Inside the box you'll find:

• The phone itself, with the large screen covered in a plastic film to prevent scratches
• A pair of headphones which connect to the phone's mini USB port
• Two magnetic styli (one for backup, thoughtful!)
• A sticky plastic screen protector
• A CD containing Microsoft ActiveSync and a trial of Outlook, as well as the manual
• A USB lead to connect the phone to the PC
• A mains adapter to convert the USB lead into a mains charger
• A leather case for the phone

Everything is excellent quality, black, and extremely stylish - the HTC branding is minimal but well placed. The headphones double up as a handsfree set thanks to their in built microphone, another nice touch.

Looks and Feels

The Touch Diamond measures 10.2cm by 5.1cm, at a mere 1.1 mm thick. Upon picking it up, the first thing you notice is how well it fits into your hand - the back of the phone is tapered slightly, peaking at the camera (imitating a diamond), and I had to double check that the thickness wasn't a mirage. It really is extremely thin, and everyone I've shown it to has commented on the thickness and the weight - compared to the original iPhone, it is indeed much lighter.

The next thing you notice is the massive screen - 2.8" has never seemed so big! At the bottom of the screen is the HTC logo, and below that there is a small control panel of 4 hardware buttons; Home, Back, Call, End. This combination of both hard and touch buttons works well - the End button can be programmed to do different things when it is held down, and I've set it to put the phone on silent which works well. In the middle of the 4 buttons is a small circular button, reminiscent of the iPhone's equivalent. It's set into the phone slightly, but this is not just a button! Around the outside is a track pad, allowing you to run your finger around the outside for certain functions, such as zooming in on webpages. That's not all though - there are 4 direction keys around the button, one each side, which click reassuringly when you press them.

There are two volume control buttons in the top corner - these can control both system and ring volume, as well as call volume and the like. As for storage, the Touch Diamond has 4GB of this inbuilt. Unfortunately, HTC didn't see the need to include any media card slots, so this isn't expandable. While 4GB is more than enough for most people, the lack of expandability isn't ideal.

Another problem with the phone is the mini USB port at the bottom. While it's not a problem in it's itself, the fact that it is the only port on the phone can lead to annoyances on occasion - for example, if you buy a car charger (they can be picked up for a measly £7 off eBay) and want to use the included headphones at the same time...well, your out of luck sorry. As well as that, while the phone has 4GB of storage and an excellent inbuilt media player, you can't use normal headphones with it without buying an adapter - while it's only £5 or so, it's a major oversight by HTC, who could have changed this negative into a positive pretty cheaply.

The Touch Diamond has some pretty nifty tricks up it's sleeve - mainly it's accelerometer and light sensor. The accelerometer allows the phone to tell when it's been tilted or turned, and adjust the screen in this way. Unfortunately, HTC's developers seem to only have implemented this half way - while moving the phone allows you to view pictures horizontally, the same can't be said about texting, which is a bit disappointing. There is a work around though, which I'll mention later. As for the light sensor, my first thought was "gimmick?" However, I realised how useful it is yesterday when I was trying to use the phone in bright sunlight (although I don't think you'll have this problem much at this time of year!). By measuring the strength of light, the Touch Diamond can dynamically adjust it's backlight as needed, so walking from bright sunlight to a dark room will switch the backlight from being nearly off to being fully on.

The Interface

The Touch Diamond runs on a version of Windows Mobile, but not as you know it...HTC use their heavily customised front end of called TouchFlo3D, which replaces the main screen of Windows Mobile with a great, sleek interface through the use of tabs. The tabs are as follows:

• Home
• People
• Messaging
• Mail
• Internet
• Photos and Videos
• Music
• Weather
• Settings
• Programs

Before I look at each in turn quickly though, Windows Mobile deserves a mention. If you've got a Windows home PC, you won't struggle to find options - at the top of the screen is the equivalent of the "start bar". On the left hand side is the Start menu, which opens when you tap it and contains links to whichever programs you choose, as well as the last 5 you opened. On the right are status icons, such as signal quality, volume level, and battery. Also on the right is a little drop down menu, in the very top corner - when you click on this, you can see memory usage, but it's most useful feature is letting you quickly see and open/close any programs which are already open and running. It's position in the very top right hand corner does make it rather awkward to use sometimes though if you don't use a stylus.

Onto the tabs...

Home

The Home page is basically the desktop of the phone, and everything is easily accessible from here. There's a large clock, and some links - Alarms, Call History, and the Calender, as well as little details like the date, tabs to Programs and the Dialer interface for making calls, and your network. Along the bottom of the screen is a slider bar, as with all the other tabs - you place your finger on the box, and move it along, and you can change tabs. An excellent way to implement the touch screen interface!

People

This is the Contacts tab - you can either call or text contacts who you set as your "favourites" (just make sure you set the right people or there might be some fights!), or view All Contacts where you can browse all contacts; scrolling is done by pulling your finger along the screen and works well too.

However, I'm not completely happy with the Favourite contacts. Well, there's nothing wrong with the idea, it's how you add them. I inserted my SIM directly from my old Sony Ericsson K800i, and while the contacts were picked up fine in the address book (admittedly with ";M" at the end of every contact) when I go to add Favourites I can only add contacts who I've added directly onto the phone. This is a major pain and the only way I can see around it is readding every contact on my phone - not fun.

Messaging (and the Keyboard)

One of my favourite parts of the phone is the messaging interface - messages are viewed individually, and you can scroll through them as with the contacts to view them. To reply, simply tap on the message, and it switches to the Windows Mobile interface. You can see the previous message you received, the row of text your typing, and taking up around half the screen is the keyboard. There are 3 options for the keyboard:

• Phone keypad - this is the same as any phone keypad, just with a couple of extra buttons for accessing Symbols and changing from ABC to T9
• Compact QWERTY - every button has two letters instead of 1, so it's a mix between a traditional phone keypad and a full QWERTY keypad. Because of this, the buttons are much bigger than those of the QWERTY keypad, while you can text faster than with the phone keypad setup when you get used to the layout.
• Full QWERTY - only for use with the stylus, but it's pretty similar to the layout of the keyboard which your using right now

If you've used a Blackberry, you'll be familiar with the layout of the messages when you view them in the Windows Mobile interface. As opposed to storing them as is the norm - in individual messages - every message you send and receive is added to your "conversation" with that contact. This is a great help if you've got a poor memory like I do, as you can just scroll up quickly and take a look at what was said last message, or even 3 messages ago!

Mail

Similar to the Messaging interface, just for your emails. There is an option for "push" email, as with the iPhone and Blackberrys, which is nice to see - emails can be delivered straight to your phone as soon as they are received in your online inbox, as opposed to the phone having to check at intervals if there are any new messages. This saves battery and bandwidth!

Internet

I'll focus more on the types of connectivity later in the review, but this tab gives you access to the inbuilt browser - Opera is the default, and much easier to use than Internet Explorer Mobile. Web pages scale to the webpage, and the scroll wheel around the button is used for zooming in and out. Even normal web pages such as www.ciao.com are rendered excellently, and can load in just a couple of seconds if you have a good 3G or WiFi connection.

There is also a built in YouTube interface which works amazingly, allowing for quick searching of videos and storing of favourite videos.

Photos and Videos

The most interesting features here to note are the camera and the slideshow feature. The camera fills up the whole screen, and while pictures are not as good as a digital camera they are still reasonable quality. Annoyingly though, the only way to access the camera is to go to this tab and click on the small "camera" button - by this time, it's more than possible that you might have missed that once in a lifetime action shot! A link on the Home page to the camera would have been nice to see, or at least the option of one.

The slide show option displays pictures one by one - the pictures can be scrolled through using the directional keys around the button, and zooming is in done by the trackpad around the button.

Music

Similar to Apple's "Coverflow" in looks, but not quite as good - you have to go into the Library interface to browse through the album covers. The music quality is good, even through the supplied headphones, although it can sound tinny when playing through the small speaker at the top of the phone.

Weather

Ever wanted a tab to tell you the weather for today and the next 5 days in any city in any country? Well, HTC have come through for you! Admittedly, it's not very useful unless you are travelling, but the 5 day forecast for your own city can come in handy if your planning ahead - maybe a game of golf if the weather's good, or a quiet day in if it's raining? Now you can decide!

Settings

The HTC has a massive number of settings, changing everything from the backlight strength to the sensitivity of the touch screen to viewing the task manager. If you want to change something and find you can't there's normally a program out there to let you do it, but I'll mention that later.

Programs

HTC use a grid of 18 programs - 6 rows, with 3 programs in each. Any program from the list of All Programs (accessible through a tab in the bottom left corner) can be added to the grid, and it works well.

HTC don't skimp with the programs they supply you. 3 games (Solitaire, Bubble Breaker, and Teeter - a maze game using the accelerometer) are supplied, along with a version of Microsoft Office Mobile with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote!

Installing programs is simply; they are supplied in the form of .cab files, which are installed simply by clicking the file through the in built File Explorer.

Connectivity

The Touch Diamond isn't short on connectivity...WiFi, GPRS, Bluetooth, Infr-ared, GPS and USB are a fierce arsenal of connectivity!

WiFi

Both b and g variants are included, and the WiFi option can be quickly enabled or disabled in the Comms Manager program. The connection page is very similar to that in XP or Vista - the various connections you can join (both security disabled and enabled) are listed along with their connection strengths, and clicking on anyone will either prompt you for a security key or connect. If you have WiFi enabled and walk into the area of a WiFi connection, the Touch Diamond will make a little "bing" noise and a pop up at the bottom of the screen will invite you to connect.

GPRS

Fast is about all I can say about this, as I haven't used it myself much. Be aware that if you don't have a data plan, you might find yourself accidently accessing the Internet through GPRS when doing little things like viewing Weather, and this isn't cheap.

Luckily, there is a program available called NoData (Google it). This allows you to enable and disable your GPRS connection at the click of a button, stopping those data bills racking up!

USB

There are two types of USB connectivity to a PC, and everytime you connect you'll get the choice of either. ActiveSync is a Microsoft applications included on the CD supplied with the phone which allows, as the name suggests, for syncing of files and contacts. Meanwhile, Disk Drive makes the phone act as a 4GB USB drive.

Transfer from the PC onto the phone and vice versa is fast, and ActiveSync has an inbuilt facility where it can automatically convert documents into a usable format when you copy them onto the phone.

GPS

Not much I can say about this as I haven't used it myself, but reports I've seen claim it's reasonably accurate. The pre-installed Google Maps facility looks great, and includes a satellite view.

Customization

While the Touch Diamond uses the TouchFlo3D interface to stop it looking like every other Windows Mobile device out there, at heart (and kernal) it's still a Windows Mobile device, so there are hundreds of free apps out there. My favourites so far are:

Gyrator2 - remember I mentioned that workaround to make the texting interface work horizontally? This is it - while it's not perfect (occasionally the keyboard will black out requiring a restart) it is excellent, and shows what HTC should have done. The keyboard even expands to fit the whole screen, making the keys bigger.

Games - plenty out there, take a look on Google for Windows Mobile free games and you'll see what I mean!

NoData - as mentioned earlier, this allows you to disable or enable GPRS at the touch of a button

Themes - the xda developers forum has hundreds of themes on it, and I use the Real Black one on my phone. This looks amazing, and you can also choose custom clocks on the site or change the font of the phone!

Klaxon - this is a custom alarm program, which can be used to replace the inbuilt Windows Mobile alarms. It allows you to switch the alarm off in a huge number of ways. Shaking your phone? Sure. Pressing the screen? Sure. Switching on your bedside light? Sure!

Other Facts and Extra Information

As I haven't covered everything in the review which you won't be able to find out from the site, I'd thought I'd add it in here, but keep it simply to read.

* The phone takes around 40 seconds to boot up from being off. Luckily, you won't be doing this - by touching the button at the top of the phone, the screen will switch off and the phone will be "locked". This is how HTC intend the phone to be used as opposed to be switched on and off. Note the alarm will not go off if you switch the phone off, it must be in this standby mode.

* As well as it's inbuilt media player, there is also Windows Media Player. Other applications also include a neat calculator and a radio, which requires the headphones to act as an antenna.

* The screen is a resistive touch screen - this means that for the screen to react to you, you have to actually apply very light pressure, as opposed to the iPhone which can pick up the phone without any pressure. So far, I've found this to be a benefit as opposed to a downside, as it stops accidental touches when your finger is hovering over the screen.

* There is a small video camera at the top of the front of the phone for video calls. It is also possible to switch to the main camera on the back of the phone when making a video call

* Battery life is good, but not exceptional - without using too many of the features, expect 3 days maximum

Evaluation (originally - see below!)

Overall, the HTC Touch Diamond is an excellent phone. The interface is smooth, it's got amazing customizability, and HTC seem to have every base covered. I cannot recommend this phone over the iPhone more.

I'd prefer to give it 4.5/5 stars, but 4 stars will have to do. Nearly perfect HTC!

Revisited!

I wrote this review several months ago, after having owned the phone for a short period of time. I felt, having owned the phone for just over a year now and used it daily, it was time to revisit it and see if what I had said before (see above) is the same as how I feel about it now.

Well, as you might have noticed from the end of the evaluation, the number of stars has fallen from 4 to 2.

The problems

Rather than go over the phone again I'll list the problems which I've faced over the past year:

- The phone has been returned once to be wiped clean (thus losing all my data and settings on it) and reloaded, after it developed the annoying fault of deciding it didn't have a SIM card installed...when it did.

- When a call is received while the keypad is open, for example while texting, the keypad will freeze in place for several seconds, so you can't accept or reject the call. Extremely annoying if its on loud and it shouldn't be.

- The small unlock button at the top has a tendency to decide its been pressed while in your pocket ; a phone call received will have the same effect as unlocking the phone if you don't hear it and let it ring through. The phone, unlocked, then knocks around your pocket, ringing people or sending text messages which contain words such as "noodles ''''''''@'dsa;'ds;ad's;ad"...

- The Touch Diamond also randomly decides that you can't tell it what to do and thus switches itself off...

- Signal quality is poor to say the least...it struggles for signal inside buildings, meaning phone call quality is awful; I find myself having to repeat things 3 or 4 times while hoping it won't suddenly drop from 2 to 0 bars of signal, which it normally does.

- Due to the design, the top two buttons are slightly separate from the screen itself - there's a thin gap (its the line in the photo just below the HTC logo). These edges tend to get caught on pockets, etc, and the edges of the two buttons are now scuffed and turned up quite badly, which looks awful.

- The screen isn't robust, and scratches very easily. I guess that is to be expected with plastic.

- Windows Mobile 6.1 has no idea what a user friendly GUI is. Take setting an alarm for example. You click on the small time writing in the alarm interface, which takes a few goes. That takes you to a screen with a clock on it, the time of the alarm, and two up and down buttons which you use to set the time. These up and down buttons are tiny! And I have no idea why - half the screen is white space!

- Doing simple things like adding music to the phone isn't simple using ActiveSync. I tend to copy it to 3 or 4 different places and hope that one of the files is picked up...

- The contacts page is the most confusing thing I have ever seen. All my contacts are shown twice - once for SIM and once for Outlook. There is no way I can find to hide SIM contacts. Contacts which are added after a call as opposed to through the address book look different and can have less information added too...

Obviously, there are some redeeming features of the phone - the screen is good quality, decent battery life, and its got a lot of features. However, I can honestly now say that I wouldn't have bought this phone, and often wish I hadn't.

All the other reviews on Ciao for this phone are 4 stars and above, but when I browse the Internet I find many people with the same problems I have had and no answers from HTC. Ironically, a friend told me after I bought it that once I had passed the honeymoon stage which happens with all HTCs I'd realise I should have got something else - I told him my Touch Diamond was awesome. Turns out he was right...
 

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