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HTC Touch Diamond Mobile Phone (Orange)
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| Price: |
12 new or used available from £130.00
Average customer review:
Product Description
HTC Touch Diamond Sim Free Unlocked Mobile Phone Smart phones these days have been known to be bundled with a tempting array of features but consumers still longing for an alternative to the boring user interfaces found on conventional phones.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #41492 in Consumer Electronics
- Brand: HTC
- Model: Touch Diamond
Features
- Display: 2.8-inch TFT-LCD
- Flat touch-sensitive screen and navigation control
- Camera: 3.2 Megapixel with auto focus
- Second camera: VGA CMOS color camera
- TouchFLOTM 3D, GPS and A-GPS ready
Customer Reviews
A shiny black slab of power.
I'm a sucker for angles, and you'll find more angles here than at a dodecahedron convention. Beautifully crafted and sleek with a glossy (fingerprint attracting) black finish.
The phone is very attractive - without doubt the best looking HTC model ever, perfectly flat with no protrusions, the bottom part contains four buttons and a circular touchpad. The buttons are all part of the same `plate' - no joins between them, they `rock' on an axis and when pressed make a satisfying click. The circular pad allows you to select items, and when finger the rim finger clock-wise/anti-clockwise to zoom in and out on certain applications (such as PDF viewer). You can press up/down/left/right around the circular button to navigate round menus and the like (embarrassingly I didn't realise this until the second day I had the phone!). Certain events cause the outside of the circular button to illuminate white, this alerts you to any incoming messages, missed calls, etc
The screen is an impressive 2.8 inches, and with the VGA resolution you are watching a screen with the resolution you'd expect on a PC Monitor. When you watch video, or photos you can appreciate the quality of this screen. It knocks the socks off of my old MDA Vario/HTC TyTN.
There's no doubt that HTC fancy a slice of the i-Phone market, and it's a big one - especially with the i-phone being network limited, but you'd never do that with a standard Smartphone. For a start the Microsoft Windows Mobile Operating System is too clunky. If you've never used a smartphone before then it feels like a nightmare; thinking you've lost all of your photos because you're looking in the wrong `My Documents' folder (you often have one on the phone AND one on the storage card). The truth is that Microsoft have never been good at producing operating systems which are intuitive and feel natural - so there's a nifty solution here - "TouchFlo 3D".
I can see the merits of this. TouchFLO 3D makes the phone more i-Phone like, and when a phone doesn't have a keyboard/keypad then a good touch interface is essential. I was pretty impressed with TouchFLO 3D but found that every so often there was a stutter in speed. Again this is a common issue with MS Smartphones. It happens far less with the latest edition (Windows Mobile 6.1) and it's clear that it's come on a long way from the Windows CE (Compact Edition) days, but if you have a several things open (navigating from one programme to another leaves the previous programme open, you have to remember to clear the memory every-so-often) then the phone starts to slow. It isn't a massive drop in speed - like I say, it holds up well, VERY well in fact compared to the smartphones I've had in the past - but even just a blip in speed means that the scrolling effect of TouchFLO jerks slightly and I would maybe ending up selecting the wrong item. The i-phone is incredibly responsive - hopefully with future Firmware updates (afterall - this is new) the TouchFlo 3D will go from being a impressive interface to a desirable one.
I've turned TouchFLO off on my phone. To be honest, I enjoyed playing with it but I am pretty familiar with the standard MS Mobile GUI so I didn't really need it - I'm a geek so I quite like getting into the guts of the phone and browsing through folder structures. For someone new to an MS Smartphone though it's a great way to become familiar with it.
Word/Excel/PowerPoint provide a business suite to work on documents on the fly, there's Internet Explorer too but don't bother with that - Opera is bundled with the phone and it's a far superior browser on this phone. The automatic rendering of text size when zooming in and out is brilliant. You'll find yourself zooming like a nutter to see if you can catch it out, but you won't be able to! Syncing with Outlook is a breeze with ActiveSync - it actually came in handy as Smartphones tend to like re-formatting all your contacts to display as `last name, first name' which I don't like. But after exporting my contacts to Outlook on my laptop it took just over a minute to whiz through them to change the "file As" name to `first name, last name' - a click to re-sync them had my phone's contacts looking normal again.
GPS has become a standard feature of high-end phones, and it's included here. Your network may bundle a free trial of something like CoPilot, but you might be able to find some free software to use with the inbuilt GPS. Infact, there is an incredible array of third party software out there - and most of it is free (search around though as some sites will still charge a `download' fee, the cheeky robbing scoundrels!). A lot of the free software is considered to be standard fare for MS Smartphones, `Smart Explorer' for example is a fully featured File Explorer which allows you to peek anywhere in your phone and send anything via Bluetooth with just a couple of clicks.
I was looking forward to using the motion sensors to turn the device sideways to view the screen in landscape mode, but I was disappointed to find that this only works for certain applications such as Opera web browser. I was hoping to use it when composing messages, but never mind. You can actually download a free piece of third party software which allows you to configure the "Motion G" sensor so that you can use landscape viewing whenever you like. For anyone thinking that such a svelte phone would have issues packing in quality motion sensors, have a go on the built in game `Teeter'. This is a truly addictive game where you navigate a metal ball around the screen in order to drop it into a green hole whilst avoiding the other holes. It is entirely controlled by tilting the phone. It is incredibly responsive and a perfect way to demonstrate the impressive capabilities of the device. I referred to the ball as being metal, as every time you bump it into an obstacle you can actually feel it make contact and you honestly get the sense that you're moving a metal ball around a rather beautifully crafted box.
In a nutshell: As a phone this makes and receives calls with a sound clarity better than any mobile I've ever used. And despite the annoying latency you get with Microsoft Mobile, this is still a cracking phone. I think people moving from a `standard' phone will take a while to get used to it, but once you do then you quickly learn how to maximise its potential. I was initially lost without a keypad/QWERTY keyboard (and left wishing I'd gone for a TyTN II) but I now find that I rarely use the stylus. When writing text messages I used the onscreen phone keypad to tap away with my finger as I would have done on an actual keypad. The screen responds well and it's not an issue. The Wi-Fi was up and running in seconds, it was literally a case of activating Wi-Fi and entering the WEP key from the back of the router. Some have critcised the battery length - but get over it! This is a slim attractive but very powerful phone; the battery was never going to be one that needed a fortnightly top-up! If you use this alongside a PC then chances are you'll be synching it regularly - and the USB connection will keep it charged.
I was going to give this 4 stars, but any issues I had with the phone were ironed out after going through each of the settings and customising it to my needs.
An i-phone killer?
"Dangermousezilla" has summed up this phone superbly. This was a simple choice between me staying with O2 and getting an i-phone 3g, or getting this beautiful piece of kit. I read review after review of both phones, and on the day of purchase went back and forth between the Orange and O2 shops four times comparing various aspects of each phone.
The i-phone is, I will admit, a very "slinky" phone but the Touch Diamond is better, smaller and feels more "solidly" built. Screens are similar in performance. Web browsing goes to the i-phone (but I don't rely on my phone for this so.....)Windows Mobile is, as far as I'm concerned, vastly superior to Apples OS, and while admittedly a bit slooooooooooooow sometimes, is familiar and easy to use.
Pictures and video on the Touch looked crisper and better defined than the i-phone and using "touch-flo" is a breeze. As a phone, conversations are clear on both but, what finally swung it for me, is that the HTC Touch Diamond just felt so much more refined and well made than the "plasticky" i-phone. All my opinion only, not out to p-off the legions of i-phoners out there, but, there is a superb alternative, the HTC Touch Diamond.
Awesome phone, but iPhone killer it aint.
In todays market, the battle for touch screen phones is always compared in terms of the iPhone. My friend has an iPhone, i have an HTC Diamond and we are always comparing the two.
Best uses:
The camera is great, the GPS is useful, and you have mobile MS office and can sync with Microsoft exchange which is great for keeping you in touch. As a result the HTC diamond is great for business and keeping you in touch (via phone, text message, MMS, email, MSN live messenger, Skype etc). The touch screen is good and while it's a nice phone to use I would seriously recommend getting the newest ROM update as it does make the phone noticably quicker.
While the phone has loads of features which are better than the iPhone, Windows Mobile is still more difficult to use than the Apple OS and as a result i think a lot of users will get fed up with it. The features certainly make it a formidable rival, but it just doesn't have quite enough to make it a true iPhone killer (e.g. the app store on the iPhone is a great feature, on windows mobile you are forced to search the internet for things you might want).
Bottom line:
I would recommend this phone to a friend, however if you want something for media and applications which are ultimately pointless but still fun, then go with the iPhone. If you want a small light weight phone which has more important features (such as GPS, internet browser etc) then go for the Diamond.
