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HTC Touch Diamond, first impressions
Even mere photos of the new HTC Touch Diamond look extremely impressive. Certain traces of stylization after Nokia Prism can be easily spotted, in this case a little bit more on the assimetrical side. The geometric elements follow the flow of curves, sacrificing the strictness of form in favour of a more organic appearance. We have already covered Diamond's market position in the previous articles, this article now being devoted entirely to the most practical aspects of the handset which you can literally feel with your fingers and see with your eyes. In real life Diamond looks just as cool as in the pictures... yet only in the bracket of Windows Mobile market. It's a niche-like, expensive, hi-tech fashion phone sporting exotic design and a slim casing hardly exceeding a centimeter at its thickest point. The overall dimensions and weight are also suspiciously modest for a highly functional, top-ranking PDA, so the first impression would be that you're being cheated about the product's innovativeness: a popular stereotype sees hi-tech products as inevitably stuffed with more hardware, larger batteries, bigger cameras and doesn't favor modest dimensions (as a sign of being lightly equipped). The explanation is quite simple: HTC just tried and succeeded in designing next-gen hardware so compact that the final product turned out even smaller than Apple iPhone. However, Diamond's all-plastic feel can hardly compete with iPhone's posh appearance.
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Diamond's casing is very vulnerable to fingerprints. The bare, glossy plastic without any signs of a soft-touch coating needs a good rub every now and then. The device's appearance really suffers from the grease and fingerprints which tend to strike back in almost no time, no matter how hard you try to keep them away by rubbing and cleaning the handset. The only available color variant is black. HTC are still pondering over the possibility of designing an alternative pink version, provided that a certain level of popularity is achieved. To our opinion, the chances are rather slim, since the model is a very expensive, hi-tech product most likely to become popular with its rather limited target audience and hardly pretending to turn into a real mass product. So a pink Diamond sounds like something hardly real, even in the future. Even the original Touch device, which had a considerably lower starting price than Diamond currently has, took a long time to become popular enough for the additional color variants to become available, pink still being off the list.
The Diamond handset fits the hand like a glove, the new text input system can at times beat even the traditional QWERTY input from other devices' conventional keyboards, for instance Palm Treo 500. Indeed, the input system seems to excel iPhone in terms of ergonomics. The number of slots is unfortunately minimized. A lack of memory extension slot limits the phone's data capacity to the amount of the integrated storage unit which can store up to 4 Gb of information. The 3.5 mm audio out is optionally acquired through a separately sold adapter inserted into the interface slot, which makes Diamond a not too bright solution for the music phone market. Camera handling has also been left neglected: there isn't even a separate button for shooting, the navigation button located right below the screen being used instead. The touch-responsive ring surrounding it serves as zoom controls, both in the camera mode and in some other applications like the web browser. Certain parallel between this element and Nokia's Navi Wheel can be drawn for sure. As for the photo quality, 3.2 Mp with auto-focusing should provide an above-than-average result, rather unimpressive in comparison with 5 Mp photos. The camera unit is very similar to the one used in Touch Cruise. HTC promised to improve the photo quality in the final serial version of the product, so we omit publishing preliminary photo samples not to mislead anyone.
The gallery, the browser and a number of other applications make use of the onboard accelerometer. The practical difference from the same-type units engaged in Nokia and SE models is the possibility to rotate the screen in all possible directions instead of just switching the screen orientation from landscape to portrait and back. Moreover, the accelerometer finds a use during incoming calls - it only takes a swing of the hand to mute the ringtone, very similar to Nokia 8800 Arte. Previous Touch models required a press of the button. The magnet used as a part of the stylus holder makes a fancy variation of the spring-action sliding parts so commonly found in numerous modern cell phones - just like a sliding part often goes the full way after a single tap of the finger, driven by the force of the spring, the stylus almost magically slips into the holder once you gave it a little impulse, driven by the power of the magnet. Something of the kind can be found with laptops produced by Apple. All these small details in the total score make a serious contribution to the product image, so far unique to the present-day market, the biggest breakthrough being the TouchFLO 3D interface.
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Hands-on with HTC Touch Diamond: a live reportage by Smape.com
The interface has gone through a very serious revamping, now it looks like a really innovative user shell. Both the graphical and functional aspects are quite pleasing - though we couldn't help thinking that way too much was borrowed from iPhone. HTC's representatives openly admit that their new product closely confronts iPhone since both are targeted at the same market sector. A separate article on our site is devoted entirely to the specifics of the TouchFLO 3D interface, so in this one we will limit our comments on this point to noting out once again that the most prominent feature of the new interface is its use of 3D graphics, sporting smooth menu transition effect and gorgeous animations. The interface produces a really deep impression, making a primary selling point for Diamond. Unfortunately, there is no way to install it on any other PDA model, even including the closely related Touch, as HTC representatives have stated. No cheaper models with the same type of interface are planned for the future as well. TouchFLO 3D is fed with the power of a dedicated graphics chip which makes it go fast and smooth, invoking clear associations with Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 (in fact, the latter bases off Diamond hardware and not vice versa despite the fact it was out prior to the release of Diamond because it was HTC who participated in the creation of XPERIA X1 while toiling on their own device of the same type.)
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TouchFLO 3D Interface seen in action
The technical specifications of HTC Touch Diamond are no longer a secret, so we are going to refrain from rendering any excessive details concerning those. The primary innovations are a fast CPU and a hi-def screen. The latter gives Diamond a certain resemblance to E-TEN's product, the obvious difference being that Diamond is the first VGA PDA which has no problems with performance. Even Gigabyte's devices with 528 Mhz CPUs on board proved to be slower. The inevitable negative consequence is, of course, the relatively short battery life, at least as it might be naturally expected. HTC did their best to make full use of the optimizations found in WM 6.1, so the negative impact on the battery life should turn out to be much less hurty that some may be expecting. The truth will surface as soon as we carry out a series of final tests. As for now, stay tuned because a few more articles covering the launch of Diamond are right ahead.
Author: Dmitriy Ryabinin, dm@smape.com SMAPE.com
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