HTC Touch Diamond, Right Off the Boat!

HTC Touch Diamondd

HTC Touch Diamond

HTC Touch Diamond

User Interface

The HTC Touch Diamond uses the company's new TouchFLO 3D user interface extensions and home screen. While the home screen applet on the first generation of Touch devices was only a small part of the whole, the home screen on the Touch Diamond is the center stage. Users can do everything from read email and text messages to control music, browse photos, and check the weather now. The system is setup as a series of panels that are linked on their left and right edges. The user can grab the active icon on the bottom of the screen to quickly move to any of the other panels, or can instead swipe a finger tip or nail (or stylus) across the screen to move right or left to a neighboring panel. The switching can be a bit slow at times, but the graphical effects are quite nice.

Once in a panel, a flick up or down will change the active item (song, photo, contact, etc) on display. Tapping on it will launch the item in the appropriate viewer or application. The new image viewer on the Diamond is quite nice, and makes good use of the phone's built-in orientation sensors (as does the new "Marble Madness" like Teeter game).

The deeper level applications on the Touch Diamond also benefit from HTC's handiwork. A finger can be used to scroll or flick most any list, and left to right swipes can do things like move to the next or previous account or message in the Inbox app. My only gripe is that while a fingernail or stylus can be used for scrolling in some parts of the system, like the home screen, only a fingertip can be used in most of the rest of the apps, since a fingernail or stylus would be used for selecting multiple items. This is a big inconsistency, but users will probably adapt to it and will be thankful for the more flexible system used on the home screen.

Another area where HTC has greatly improved upon the normal Windows Mobile experience is text input. HTC has new versions of its on-screen virtual T9 phone keypad, 20 key SureType keypad, and full QWERTY keyboard. All three of them work very well, and I am especially pleased with the full QWERTY keyboard, which makes it much easier to type on than you might have normally expected. It lacks the vibration feedback I was hoping for, like the iPhone, but the word completion and prediction are especially easy to use thanks to nature of the touchscreen - just tap the word and keep on typing.

Check out the videos of the Touch Diamond in action to get a far better feel for the work HTC has done than you can get by reading this text.