HTC Touch Diamond Review – Familiar Power and Unfamiliar Design Superiority

Any Microsoft Windows users are going to find that the HTC Touch Diamond is highly intuitive and it’s going to be familiar enough to be able to get up to speed very quickly. What will surprise Windows users are the sensibilities that make this design superior.

Just on the power side alone the processor rips along at a pretty fast 528 megahertz. It uses ROM type memory of 256 mega bytes and has 192 megabytes of RAM. Combined with high speed internet using HSDPA the connectivity moves at 384 kilobytes per second on the upload and downloads a whopping 7.2 megabytes per second on the download side.

Impressive.

The makers of this phone brag of the broadband like experience of using this phone and I do have to say that during testing it definitely rivaled my experience of using my power user PC at home. I am looking forward to reading how some of my fellow reviewers faired with it in testing and under what – if any – conditions it failed to deliver that kind of an experience.

There’s the ubiquitous start button that I’ve come to expect from any Windows operating system, and a simple tweak like positioning in the upper, top left hand corner managed to give it a bit of a unique twist. I think its human nature that as much as thrive with standardized development, we do want to see changes that feel like improvements.

The glossy 2.8 inch touch screen is contrasted with the brushed metal finish around it. TouchFLO 3D, HTC’s proprietary touch screen interface, offers tactile feedback to users and is touch-responsive. The interface is designed to specifically give images and videos a more lifelike 3 dimensional feel and is fueled by a 3D graphics processor. I definitely enjoyed the ease with which I was able to play with, select, launch and scroll through using my fingertips, as well as the vivid look as I did.

There are the familiar capabilities including a 3.2 mega pixel camera with video recording capabilities. You also have BlueTooth and WiFi built in, as well as USB support.

The battery allows for up to 330 minutes of talk time, up to 396 hours of standby and up to 145 hours of video call time, depending of course on network and phone usage.

I’ve never actually been a big fan of GPS until I started using it, and now I’m hooked. The GPS is integrated for use with maps software, which allows for a full turn-by-turn satellite navigation experience, something that’s missing from most camera phones bragging about GPS capability. You can even find out the weather, which in many crowded metropolitan areas can be a big factor in traffic congestion.

All this power and familiar technology is packed into a 110 gram package. Not bad.

Overall, I haven’t yet found a good reason to NOT recommend this phone, and am taking a good hard look at changing to it myself. I’ll keep you posted.