Foreword, packaging

HTC Touch Diamond... our regular readers have probably met this name lots of times, as nowadays we can hear it everywhere, although such publicity is not characteristic of Pocket PCs. HTC, however, does everything differently then their competitors, and they are even pretty good in advertising too, so there's no wonder in this. The handset has been officially announced only two moths ago, but since then new information has been coming through continuously, in order to keep our attention active. It was active, fans of such devices – like me – have been eagerly waiting for it to become available.

It's a kind of wonder, that it got to us so fast. We have been knowing for a month that by the beginning of July/end of June the first shipment is going to arrive to our country, but XXL PC has still managed to acquire one for us somehow. I have been overly happy, mostly because I had to give back the pink Nokia 7310. To tell the truth, it wasn't hard.

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Not even the packaging is a conventional one, it's one of the most demanding boxes I have ever seen, it easily competes with any Apple product's. The box is very interesting, it a pyramid-like shape. The interior is made of a very high quality material, on the top we can find the device and a headset, while below them there are the accessories: charger, data cable, spare stylus, screen protector foil and the manual/CD. The charger has a design just like the handset, it has simple straight shapes and a shiny surface; when plugged in, the HTC logo on it is lit up. It's very elegant.

Exterior

The PDA has got the name Diamond after its back. This is very fashionable nowadays, it has been started by Nokia with the Prism series, and then Sony Ericsson continued with Z555i, which has also been successful. So HTC follows this path, they have only added what has been needed, and the result is a special, but still not ostentatious device, at least regarding the back, as there are no geometrical shapes on the front.

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That part shines too, which has result in collecting lots of fingerprints. Although there are no “diamonds” over here, we don't have to do without design elements. Even the speaker is very spectacular, as the metallic grating is sunk, which is not a very good thing in terms of usability as all kinds of particles get inside. There is a silver frame around the 2.8” VGA (480 x 640) display, which surrounds the controls too – it looks as if it was black from certain angles. The display has a very high quality picture, it is really beautiful, its color fidelity is better then even E-TEN's similar solutions. The plexi cover is hard, it has been designed to be used with fingers, just like we have seen on other handsets from the Touch series. On the bottom there are the main control keys, which means four buttons and a 5-way navigation pad. They look touch-sensitive at first glance, but only the selection key is such, which is used when taking photos. The function keys on top have to be pressed quite hard to work. The backlight is spectacular, in case of an incoming call or a missed task light is running around the d-pad, thus reminding the user that something has happened.

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The silo of the stylus is very original, it's worth a dedicated paragraph. It is magnetic, so on one hand it's not loose, and on the other hand it's very spectacular, as then inserting the pen, the handset really “sucks it in”. The whole system is even more advanced, as Diamond knows when we have removed the stylus (which has an average size, by the way), and so we can turn on the phone this way when it's in standby, or launch the notepad during calls. Due to being magnetic, the phone pulls the stylus, if we put it very close to it (~1-2 cm).

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Photo of the display / the stylus “stuck” to the side of the PDA

The machine, by the way, has quite a compact size, it can be held even in our pockets, it weighs 110 grams, it's 102 x 51 x 11.5 mm. It is a great achievement to pack so many features in such a small size, I could say that this has not happened before. The use of materials is also great, but due to being shiny, all parts of the handset collect fingerprints a lot. As you can see on the pictures, the corners are rounded.

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On top, near the sunk power button, we can see the handsfree speaker. On the left there are the volume control keys, while under them there is a label : HTC innovation.

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On the opposite side there is another label that indicates the size of the internal storage. On the bottom we can see the HTC ExtUSB connector, in which we can plug the headset or a conventional microUSB cable, the latter one being used for synchronization.

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Hardware, operating system

The PDA's operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, but one couldn't tell this at first sight, which is due to the TouchFLO 3D interface, that is presented in detail on the next page. The CPU is a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A, RAM has a size of 192 MB, while ROM is 256 MB large. We can use 55 MB of the first one for running programs, and we can turn off TouchFLO 3D in order to get some additional space, but we won't really need that. We have about 50 MB of the ROM for storing data, but this is extended with 4 GB of built-in flash memory, which can be read at 5.92 MB/sec and written to at 2.56 MB/sec, according to my measurements. The memory cannot be expanded unfortunately, but it might not even be needed, taking into consideration the size of the internal memory. The boot process is rather slow, TF3D needs about 20-30 seconds to start up.

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According to the synthetic benchmarks the handset is fast, it's very fast. The new Qualcomm chip does its job rather fast, although it's faster than the previous MSM7200 only because the clock speed difference. Pocket PC Mark had some rather good results both for the memory and the file system, the mark for the graphical subsystem is not very high, at least when compared to QVGA devices. It performs better, however, then VGA resolution E-TEN handsets, thus we can say that the Qualcomm chip is better for high-resolution screens than Samsung's CPU. We currently cannot compare VsBenchmark results to many other ones, but it's sure that Diamond is the fastest of all the devices tested so far.

TouchFLO 3D

And now let's take a look at the heart of the system, TouchFLO 3D. The name is a bit misleading, as the GUI has no 3D, while the previous edition was in fact 3D, we should just remember the rotatable cube. Even in spite of this fact I think that it is much easier to use, it's just a bit slow. The system itself is a Today plugin, but it's prepared for everything, we can't select another plugin during its use. Before talking about usability, let's watch the demo video we made – I'm sorry for the quality, it had been recorded with a Samsung G810.

I think you can see that changing between menu items takes 1-2 seconds, which is quite frustrating. When changing the graphics don't stutter so I had the feeling that it's not slow because of lack of resources, but it's done this way intentionally. We have three methods of changing between menu items. The first is to tap the appropriate icon, the second is to stroke the center of the screen with our finger horizontally, while the third is to keep our finger on the row that has the icon we want to activate – this latter one can be seen at he beginning of the video, I think this is the fastest browsing method.

The first tab is a kind of standby screen, we can customize this with wallpapers. This is where the current time is shown in large, with the missed calls and the shortcut of the calendar below. The second tab is a dialing screen, which displays the pictures of our favorite contacts: we can browse between these by moving our finger vertically. We can access the phonebook by pressing the lower left software key (All People), where we can browse between the first letters just like in iPhone. Of course the scrolling routine is present, and Diamond has the best implementation of this of all the Windows Mobile-based devices, it's almost as good as in iPhone, but we can see a bit of delay compared to that.

The third and fourth men items are for messaging, the first shows SMS messages, while the second stores emails, in case we have properly configured Outlook. To tell the truth I had the most problems with the text messaging part. Moving our finger up or down we can scroll the messages, the animation is very spectacular, but we have to wait at least 5 seconds when tapping on a message for Outlook to start, which is very much. SMS messages are displayed like a chat conversation, which is great, but this part is really so slow that it affects usability.

After these comes the Internet tab, where we can start the Opera Mobile 9.5 web browser and the shell software used for watching YouTube videos; we'll describe these a bit later. The sixth tab is the picture viewer, where we can browse pictures, and upon selecting one of them the dedicated image viewer application starts up. This is already known from Touch Slide, we can zoom and browse with our finger, but as a new feature the software rotates the picture according to the handset's orientation thanks to the gyroscope. The camera's software is also accessed from this tab.

The next tab is dedicated to the music player, we'll talk about this one later on. After this we can find the system settings tab.

At the end of the list we can find the shortcuts for applications. Still, this is not all what TouchFLO 3D has to offer. Tapping the upper tray we get the picture you can see above, and here we can set all the stuff here with our finger; sound volume for example.

A task manager is also included in the package, which has a primary advantage of really closing applications after pressing X (if we set it to do so), and tapping the icon in the top right corner we get a list of currently running applications, which can be closed easily this way. The Start menu has also been adapted to use with a finger, the rows are large enough. We can set any function we want to the call reject key too, for example we can enable keypad locking at long press, or we can make the whole PDA to shut up (a.k.a. mute it).

The virtual keyboard has also been redesigned, it has three different views, you can see all of them on the picture above. I have used the first, full QWERTY layout, it is really comfortable to use, the only problem with it is that it covers quite a lot of the screen. It is quite like the one on the iPhones, we can correct mispresses, as the system enters the character only after taking our finger off the screen. There is a dictionary with word completion in English. There is a “semi-QWERTY” and a phone keypad view, these surely come in handy when used in a vehicle. The designers have also payed attention to make switching between the views simple, as the list that displays the different views is also easy to handle with a finger.

Opera 9 and other sotware

Although TouchFLO 3D is a great thing by itself, the manufacturer has packed a lot of other useful stuff on Diamond. We can find one of these in the settings, with it we can set Diamond to behave as an ActiveSync device or a USB Mass Storage Device when attached to the computer – the latter evidently comes in handy when transferring data.

So the web browser is Opera Mobile 9.5. I can say without any exaggeration that this is the best browser for this platform. It's very fast, displays web pages nicely, without errors, we can find a great scrolling routine in it, it has tab support, it rotates the picture according to the PDA's orientation, switches to fullscreen mode automatically when starting browsing and it zooms pages nicely. Upon a double-tap it zooms in, but unfortunately it is not as good as Safari from this point of view, as it doesn't always fit to the selected paragraph's width. As an example: we have a 500 pixel wide text box, and upon double-tapping it might happen that we'll only see 400 pixels of it, so some of it will be cut off (usually form the end).

There is a dedicated application for watching YouTube videos. It can only run in fullscreen mode, but it's cool, usable and fast. Videos are played back continuously, in landscape view, on fullscreen.

We are still far from the end of the list of extras. The Office family's OneNote application is still a new thing. The fact that it's present is not due to Diamond, but to Windows Mobile 6.1. In the menu, besides the factory default extras, we can find Adobe Flash Lite player and Adobe Reader, Java environment (JBlend), and MP3 editor, an app for GPS location (QuickGPS), the volume controller we can know from E-TEN devices and a dedicated dictaphone application. The game called Teeter is very cool, it's a game involving balls and a labyrinth, and makes use of the gyroscope. It becomes quite hard after a while, but it's sure lots of fun.

Phone calls, data transfer

The only strange moment regarding phone calls is that in case of incoming calls there is a ~2 second delay between the moment when backlight is turned on and the phone starts ringing. This means that when we see the phone, we can “foresee” that we'll have a call, but since in this case the caller already hears ringing, we're practically lagging two seconds. Sound quality was okay, the device had no problems with switching between GSM/UMTS networks. By the way the GSM module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), and thanks to the frontal camera we can make video calls when on 3G network. There are of course environmental profiles, the vibra engine is quite powerful. It's very useful that in case of incoming calls it's enough to put the PDA face down on the table and it is then muted. I have used this a lot.

The list of supported data transfer protocols will satisfy all needs. WiFi 802.11b/g are supported, but we don't have to give up on speed even when there's no network around, as we can use HSDPA too – in case there's no coverage we'll have to do with EDGE or GPRS. The GPS receiver is a 20-channel one, it is NMEA 0183-compatible, but I couldn't really test this as I only have authentic iGO software, and I couldn't insert the card.

I didn't mention the call log yet: accepted/rejected/dialed calls can be displayed separately or on the same list. For those who are not so familiar with WM I have to tell that Outlook is responsible for all messaging, it has an email client and it supports multimedia messages. The same software is used as address book, and we can store names up to the size of the internal memory, which practically means an unlimited number of entries, with lots of extra fields. With the previously mentioned software we can do voice dials and issue voice commands, but in my opinion voice recognition isn't very effective.

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Multimedia

The camera on the back has a resolution of 3.2 megapixels, and it has autofocus. The only problem with its use is that there is no dedicated exposure button on the machine, we have to take pictures with the selection key on the navigation panel – and this is touch-sensitive, so as we touch it the camera focuses, and as we press it takes the picture. Focusing is surprisingly fast and picture quality is pretty good, although colors are a bit dim and we can observe some noisiness and rim obscuration. Pictures can have a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels, the size of the images is between 300 and 1200 kB. There is an average number of available settings, we can set white balance, JPEG compression (three values), light metering (average and centered-weighted), and besides these we can use a timer, effects and exposure correction (+/- 2 EV in 0.5 steps). The highest available resolution for videos is 352 x 288 pixels (CIF), while the video format can be MPEG4 or H.264.

In terms of music iPhone is quite a strong competitor, and to tell the truth no device managed to live up to that standard, at least not in terms of usability. Well, HTC didn't fuss around too much and they just simply stole the idea of the Apple guys, which means that we have an interface in Diamond that is just as usable. I have already mentioned TouchFLO's music player part, but the album viewing and browsing is here mostly for the sake of design, we won't be selecting music there but in the music folder. To access this we have to press the Library key, which makes the interface known from iPhone appear with the scrolling routine, where we can sort tracks by artist, album, genre and composer and we can also use playlists. The copy of Cover-Flow is not included, so no matter how much we rotate the PDA, we won't have a different view.

The equalizer has 10 bands, we can create our own presets – but this part can be accessed only when the headset is plugged in, I really couldn't understand this. We can seek fast in tracks, but setting the volume is a bit problematic, we have to use the lateral volume control keys, or we have to select the speaker icon at the top. The first has the problem that it changes the volume in large steps, we have only five levels when setting volume with the hardware buttons, although there are about a dozen. The FM radio can be found in the programs section. Sound quality is medium when on handsfree speakers, while the headset in the package is quite good and looks cool, but the lack of a standard jack output is quite a big mistake.

Battery, summary

The battery has a capacity of only 900 mAh. This suggests that our little Diamond won't stay online for too much, while in case we use it actively we really should charge it daily, even though it had an uptime of about two days if I wasn't listening to music. Talk time, according to the specs, is 4.5-535 hours, the first is on WCDMA network, the latter is for GSM.

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Summary: HTC Touch Diamond is not an everyday handset. It is a great leap forward in Windows Mobile based phones, outstanding quality, lots of smart features and finally there is a system that can be used well with fingers and we have a good virtual keyboard, with a well thought out construction. There is nothing to complain about regarding its list of features, the only problem is that TouchFLO 3D is quite slow, and there might be many who can't get accustomed to this. Here it currently costs €545 EUR, which, taking into consideration the top models of competitor manufacturers', is a good buy, and it is a pleasant price for this PDA that has really innovative solutions. But because of the slow TF3D it is not highly, just simply recommended:

HTC Touch Diamond

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

HTC Touch Diamond has been provided by XXL PC. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlpc.hu.

Specifications

HTC Touch Diamond
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz UMTS 900/2100 MHz
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
	Size	102 x 51 x 11.5 mm
	Weight	110 grams
	CPU	528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A
	ROM/RAM	256 / 192 MB (50 / 55 MB free to use) +4096 MB flash memory (3800 MB free to use)
	Display	2.8” diagonal, 480 x 640 pixels resolution, 16 bit color depth touchscreen
	Expandability	not expandable
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	Infra / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	GPS receiver	NMEA 0183
	Audio	HTC ExtUSB output, microphone, mono speakers
	Camera	3.2 megapixels, autofocus
	Battery	900 mAh changeable Li-Ion
	Other	HTC TouchFLO 3D user interface, gyroscope, Opera Mobile 9.5, HTC VueFLO