HTC Touch Diamond, Right Off the Boat!

HTC Touch Diamond

HTC Touch Diamond

HTC Touch Diamond

HTC Touch Diamond

Yesterday I received an HTC Touch Diamond, one of the initial batch of the phones to ship for sale in Asia. The Touch Diamond represents HTC's second generation of finger touch based Windows Mobile Professional smartphones, and features the new TouchFLO 3D user interface extensions and home screen. While it is a bit hard to review this device since it only supports one lonely GSM band in the USA, 1900MHz GSM/EDGE, I can still give you folks an idea of what the device is like, and what its features and shortcomings are.

This won't be a full blown review, something I'll probably save until a North American variant is available, but I think that most Touch fans will find it interesting. On top of that, I've included 3 videos of the Touch Diamond in action, so you can get a better feel for what the device is really like.

Physical Aspects

This latest version of the Touch is smaller than the original. It is a bit taller, that's true, but it is both narrower and significantly thinner. It also weighs 5.5 grams or so less. Not a huge difference, but the changes make the Touch Diamond even more pocketable than the original. You can see a full list of Touch Diamond specs in our launch event story.

Like the original, the Touch Diamond sports a simple design. The front of the device is perfectly flat, consisting of two panels - one for the touchscreen, one for the controls. The controls include a home button, a back button, two call buttons, and a d-pad controller. The d-pad might only look like a round button, but there are four directional buttons that surround it that can be pressed. They are real buttons, not touch sensitive. There is a touch sensitive aspect to the d-pad, though, as when the user circles the center button with a finger tip, the device will zoom in or out when in an appropriate application like the photo viewer. I would really have liked to have seen this be used for regular menu and list scrolling as well, but that is not the case.

The rest of the device is quite simple. There are a pair of volume keys on the left edge, a power switch up top, a data/headset/USB port on the bottom, and the lens for the 3.2 megapixel camera around back. The back sports a very unsimple design, though, which features facets like a gemstone and a high gloss surface. I'm not fond of it at all, really, as it becomes overwhelmed by fingerprints and hand smudges almost instantly once it is handled.

The VGA resolution display on the Touch Diamond is great. 480x640 resolution just makes everything look much sharper. VGA displays first showed up on old PocketPC devices years ago, but this year is when they finally become mainstream. The touch action on the screen is also improved over the older models', and the advent of TouchFLO 3D makes flickable scrolling and such much easier. More on that later.

One last interesting feature is the stylus, which fits into a silo at the bottom right corner of the phone. It sports a magnetic latch instead of a normal snap-in design. I worry that the magnet a) might not be strong enough to hold the stylus securely, and b) might be strong enough to cause problems for credit cards and such. I do like how the phone switches on when the stylus is removed, but that could have been accomplished without a magnet.

If you wish to check out the Diamond's cool box and the various included goodies, head on over to DigitalBurn.com for the HTC Touch Diamond unboxing story.