The HTC Touch was the first real competition the iPhone faced, even if it didn’t necessarily set out to be. HTC was surely trying to capitalize on the popularity of Apple’s all-touch device, but Windows Mobile is a more open though much clunkier UI than OS X, and ultimately the devices were really in a different class. Sure, TouchFLO gave a finger-friendly skin to the Touch, but in reality the iPhone was built from the ground-up as a consumer friendly, media-oriented device whereas the Touch was a Windows Mobile business device that happened to lose the keyboard and get some fancy software. Don’t get us wrong, we loved the Touch, but it just wasn’t iPhone material.

Now comes the second generation, dubbed the Touch Diamond, and it’s obvious that HTC is ready to take on the iPhone properly this time around. Gone is the gimmicky TouchFLO, replaced by a completely overhauled and practical TouchFLO 3D. Web surfing is handled beautifully by Opera Mobile 9.5 instead of Mobile IE; 7.2Mbit/s HSDPA and Wi-Fi makes the experience that much better. Users can browse photo albums and listen to their music directly from the homescreen. Little things, such as resting the phone on its face to trigger silent mode or the phone waking up when the stylus is removed, reaffirm HTC CFO Cheng Hui-min’s description as "the most important product for HTC this year."

Design

The design on the HTC Touch Diamond is really impressive. The diamond-inspired back panel looks really sleek and so does the glossy front panel. The first thing that you notice is the Touch Diamond is not pitch black as shown on HTC ads. When exposed to direct light the front panel is actually grey resembling a bit the HTC Touch Cruise display frame. You can clearly see that on some of the photos.

As always, the problem with glossy panels is that they are really prone to fingerprints. It takes only a short time of working with the HTC Touch Diamond to cover it with smudges and ruin the otherwise pleasant looks.

The front panel is dominated by the 2.8-inch screen of the exiting VGA resolution. While not a novelty among PocketPCs the VGA screen is really one of the highlights of the HTC Touch Diamond. The incredibly high pixel-to-area ratio greatly improves the picture quality and earns a point for the newest member of the HTC family.

The rest of the front panel is taken by the four hardware soft keys and the special scroll wheel/D-pad combo. In all fairness we have to admit that the regular keys feel somewhat cheap as they don't provide enough tactile feedback.

The D-pad is an entirely different story. It combines hardware key functionality in the regular 5 directions plus a touch sensitive overlay forming a scroll wheell.

This touch-sensitive scroll wheel can be used for zooming images, web pages, messages, and doubles as music controls. It is basically the same as the HTC Touch Cruise, except for the touch-sensitivity thingy.

On the top of HTC Touch Diamond there is only the power key, which is also used for waking up the phone when in sleep mode.

The right side of the handset is completely deprived of any functional elements and is only diversified by the "4GB internal memory" label. A dedicated camera shutter key would have come in handy.

On the left side of the Diamond we find the volume rocker, which is large enough and comfortable to use.

The bottom features the miniUSB slot which is used for connecting the data cable and the headphones. The charger also plugs in here. The other noteworthy element is the stylus which scores another point for the Diamond.

When you start putting the stylus in, you don't need to push it all the way down. The stylus slot is magnetic and it literally attracts the stylus in. The stylus is also active so when you take it out the phone automatically wakes up.

The backside of the phone is where the designers seem to have put the most effort when developing the HTC Touch Diamond. However in terms of functional elements it only hosts the 3 megapixel camera lens. There is no flash of any kind but LED flash units are usually not usable so it's not a big loss.

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.

Phonebook

Outside of the People tab, the phonebook on the Touch Diamond is standard Windows Mobile fare. From that tab the user can launch the full phonebook, which is identical to what we have seen on past HTC WM devices, such as the Touch. The contacts are listed alphabetically by last name, though the list can be sorted by company as well. Along the right hand side is HTC’s Random Access plug-in, which displays the alphabet top down and the user can run their finger along it to select a certain letter and jump through the contact list. From the phone screen, as you begin to type a number it will match it with your contacts both numerically and alphabetically. For instance, if you type in 866 it will match any 866 numbers but also bring up anybody with a form of Tom in their name.

Contact storage is limited only by system memory, so for all intents and purposes it is limitless. Each contact can store a wealth of information, such as company, job title, picture ID, several different numbers and addresses, multiple emails and IM names, assistant and manager information, customer ID and account numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, spouse and children. And if that’s not enough, you can always add notes. In fact, if you’re on a call with a contact and you pull the stylus out the Diamond will automatically launch the notepad and associate the note taken with that contact.

HTC has created custom screens for incoming and outgoing calls. The outgoing screen displays the contact name and phone number at the top, and to the left of that is the Picture ID (if one is not assigned a default silhouette is used.) There is a grouping of six buttons in the middle- two rows of three- which includes Hold, Add Call, Note, Mute, Speaker and Contacts. At the bottom is a large red End Call button. The incoming screen is a bit plainer; the Picture ID is centered at the top, and below is the contact name and number. A large green Answer and red Ignore button sit below that, and finally is a Mute Call option along the bottom. The Picture ID is not quite as small as a standard Windows Mobile ID is, but it’s still not large. It is larger on the incoming than outgoing screen, and with the VGA resolution the size isn’t really an issue.

Of course this all syncs neatly with Outlook, making contact management that much easier. If the user is connected to an Exchange server two-way Outlook sync can be done over the air.

Voice dialing is handled by Cyberon Voice commander. It is very similar to VoiceSignal, but adds some advanced features such as controlling music playback, checking upcoming appointments and launching applications.

Organizer

Again, the PIM functionality of the Diamond is the same as other Windows Mobile devices. The calendar is launched from the Home tab. It can be viewed in several ways; Agenda, Day, Week, Month and Year. Adding an appointment is simple, though not exactly finger friendly. Since we’re dealing with the standard Windows Mobile interface here it is best to pull out the stylus to add events.

It is a very advanced calendar, offering everything a user would need and expect including recurrences, reminders, category grouping, sensitivity settings and much more. Notes can also be added to an event, for instance the user can set an appointment for a meeting, then take notes for that meeting within the appointment. That way, the user can simply go back to that calendar event to find the corresponding notes.

The Diamond offers other essential PIM elements such as Tasks, Notes, Voice Recorder and a calculator. These programs are more basic and all work as you would expect them to. There are a few options available for Tasks, for instance setting priorities, reminders, recurrences and categories. Notes can be handwritten or entered via the various keypads. Other than that it and the rest are barebones, which is just how simple programs should be.

We love TF3D, and wish HTC had paid some more attention to the core PIM elements of the Diamond as well. Finger-friendly programs like One Touch Organizer and PocketCM Contacts have made life much easier on WM devices in the past, but with the Diamond’s VGA resolution they do not work properly. Hopefully the WM developer community will again rise up and offer some solutions to this problem.

Camera
 
The Diamond features a 3.2 megapixel main camera with autofocus, as well as a forward facing VGA camera for self shots and video calling. The main camera performed well, with good color representation and crisp lines. There was a bit of blurring at times, but it’s very possible that can be chalked up to shaky hands as other pictures turned out clear. The autofocus is triggered by bringing your finger near the d-pad center button; the camera will focus and pressing the button snaps the shot. There are 5 resolution steps, a two and ten second self timer and the user can choose from predefined white balance settings and adjust the brightness. The camera can shoot with grayscale, sepia or negative effects and there are user preference options such as where to save the files, review duration, etc.

Videos can be recorded in MPEG4 or H.263 formats and can be shot in Small, Medium, Large and CIF (352x288) resolutions. The documentation doesn’t actually specify what Small, Medium and Large resolutions are, but it appears Large is actually 352x288 as well. The camcorder utilizes the autofocus features as well, but as expected the overall quality was not on par with the camera. For a cell phone it was above average, there was some pixilation which got worse as you pan around, but it was plenty good for YouTube and general web use. The user can again change white balance settings, adjust the brightness, change the effect and set a few preferences, but overall the settings are minimal.

Multimedia

HTC offers a custom music player and album viewer that is integrated with TF3D, but when media files are opened through the File Explorer Microsoft Picture Viewer and Windows Media Player serve as the default players. HTC Album (the picture/video player) is very good, but the music player has some shortcomings.

TC Album allows users to view pictures and video full screen. Turn the Diamond on its side and the picture follows suit- gone is drawing stupid circles to get the picture to rotate!- and you can scroll through your media with the flick of your thumb. The video player is very similar to the iPhone. Videos play in full-screen landscape mode and tapping the video brings up transparent controls. They look amazing on the crisp, VGA screen.

The music player looks nice enough, but isn’t the simplest program to use. From the Music tab on the homescreen you can control your music. Album art is displayed for the songs, and when you flick the art up or down you move forward and back between tracks. However, this is not like Cover Flow where you can scroll through the albums by their art, then bring up the album’s track list and play from there.

The library works like TF3D, with tabs along the bottom. In the library you can sort by artist, album, song, genre and composer. You can create playlists, but otherwise you can either play all the songs at once or a single album at a time. When you play all songs they are sorted alphabetically regardless of album. We prefer Windows Media Player and its library, which allow you to play all albums in alphabetical order while staying true to the original track lists. There is an tab for purchased music, but there is no store available.

One issue many users are bound to run into is album art. Anyone who has used Cover Flow without properly tagged songs know there are a bunch of ?’s on the screen, and the same is true with HTC’s music player. Making the matter worse is its seeming inability to read embedded art. Even though the .mp3s we loaded were tagged with art the player didn’t recognize it and we had to actually add the image file to the folder and rename the file folder.*. Even still, this didn’t work for a handful of albums and we were stuck with the dreaded ?. The homescreen integration is nice, but HTC has some work to do on the music player.

The MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, WAV, and AMR-NB audio codecs are supported. There is no 3.5mm jack so the user is restricted to miniUSB headphones, a set of which is included in the package. The quality isn’t bad, on par with included iPod headphones, but they will most likely be uncomfortable to those with medium and smaller ears.

There is an FM tuner as well, though the included stereo headphones must be used as they contain an integrated FM antenna. The interface is clean and displays station and song information. The reception is weak, but it’s still a nice feature to have.

One very nice feature of the Diamond is the YouTube player. It is a stand-alone program nearly identical to the one found on the iPhone. There are four tabs: All Videos, Bookmarks, History and Search. All Videos is further broken down into Most Viewed, Top Rated and Featured. Videos launch in full-screen mode, and like the iPhone tapping the screen brings up transparent controls. The scroll wheel around the d-pad is active here as well, though it’s not as smooth as we’d like. The video quality was surprisingly excellent, though we were running over Wi-Fi. Still, the videos looked superb on the VGA screen and audio was good and in-sync.
 
Software

The Diamond offers 192MB DDR SDRAM and 256MB ROM, with 4GB of internal storage in lieu of a microSD slot. As we noted earlier, navigating TF3D is smooth but the Windows Mobile environment is decidedly less so at times. One thing we did notice is that out of the box 65% of the memory was in use, compared to around 25-30% when we reviewed the CDMA Touch. This certainly plays a factor in the sluggishness. By disabling TF3D we were able to get down to around 40% memory use after a restart, and navigating through Windows Mobile was noticeably snappier, though still not perfect. Interestingly enough, after disabling and restarting, when we reinitiated TF3D there was only about 50% of memory in use. While there does not appear to be any major memory leakage, HTC seems to have some memory tomfoolery on their hands. The good news is that issues like this can be addressed with software optimization, let’s hope that HTC does just that in future updates.

There are loads of programs available for Windows Mobile, though many of them will not work with the Diamond due to its VGA display. It is usually a simple fix by the writer, but lots of programs (such as the aforementioned and beloved One Touch Organizer) are not supported anymore. The Diamond is not the first WM VGA device however, and as VGA becomes increasingly popular you will see more and more programs pop up.

Out of the box there are some notable programs, such as Office Mobile, Adobe Reader and Flash Lite. Office Mobile allows users to edit Word and Excel files (including Office 2007 documents,) while Power Point is for viewing only. JBlend Java is also included, allowing the user to install Java midlets such as Mobile Gmail.

Conclusion

This is one of the most visually attractive Windows Mobile handsets we’ve used. The physical design is impressive, and the Touch FLO 3D interface is a thing of aesthetic beauty. Unfortunately, the performance issues we encountered would make us hesitant to put this into our regular rotation. We also couldn’t stop comparing it to the iPhone and how many things HTC “borrowed”. There’s the slide-the-button menu to enable or disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc., a lock button on the top of the device, an A-Z alphabet on the right side of the contacts application which works just like the iPhone’s, the double-tap in Opera to zoom in and out of pages, and others. We understand there are only so many ways to create a usable UI for a touch screen phone, but we still couldn’t help thinking of most of it as a fake iPhone. If HTC manages to clear up some of the performance issues with a future firmware update, we could possibly see the Diamond as a suitable contender, but as it stands, there are a number of other viable handsets that deserve a look if you’re in the market for a touchscreen device.