Clove Technology’s Blog

Review compliments of Chrs from mobiletechaddicts.

When HTC announced the refresh to the original Touch Diamond back in February it looked like a major update with some great new features especially the hardware. Well here we are a few months later with the device in hand and we have spent a few days testing it and trying the new features so sit back and read on for a full and detailed review with lots of pictures and screenshots.

The external parts of the Touch Diamond2
The front of the phone has a beautiful high quality metal finish, at the bottom we have the phone end and send buttons, the end button also doubles up as the home button, a Windows key which is a requirement for future devices that will support Windows Mobile 6.5 and a back button. Above the keys you can see the zoom slider, this is a touch sensitive panel that you slide your finger along to zoom in and out of pictures and web pages.

The top part of the front you can see the ear piece grille and the front facing video camera. The screen is 3.2” and has a resolution of 800 x 480.

The right edge of the device you can see the external speaker grille and the stylus. The stylus is not magnetic like the original Diamond, it does not get sucked into the phone with a satisfying clunk, you have to physically push it home. One feature that does remain is the phone coming out of standby when you remove the stylus.

The left edge has the volume up and down rocker switch and the worlds HTC Innovation. There is no dedicated camera button on this device.

The bottom of the Diamond2 has the lanyard connector, the microphone and the damned annoying EXT USB which is the charging point and the headset connector. No 3.5mm headset jack to be found so it’s adaptor at the ready if you want to use your high quality wired headsets.

The top of the device has the on / off button and here you can see some similarities with the build quality of the Sony Ericsson X1, the colour and material used are very similar and it does look and feel like a quality build.

Looking at the phone from the back, you can see that it no longer has the uneven backing with the diamond cut edges that the original was named around, this is a step in the right direction as the original phone never sat flush on the desk due to the uneven backing. The 5 Megapixel camera lense is at the top and there is no longer a plastic cover over the lense, this was another problem with the original Diamond so HTC are learning from previous mistakes which is good to see. The black plastic as you can see really, no I mean really attracts finger prints.

Under the battery cover you can see the SIM card slot and the slot to the left is the MicroSD card slot. The back cover has to be removed to swap the MicroSD card however there is no need to remove the battery so a hot swap would be possible.

TouchFlo3D Software
So lets take a detailed look at Touch Flo 3D and the screens that we can use and what they bring.

The main home screen is straight forward, indicators along the top for various things like battery, phone signal strength etc. Under that we have the network that the phone is currently connected too then the large clock which is styled like an old flip type analogue clock, its a very nice and clear home screen. The date and call history are also shown plus any upcoming appointments. If you swipe upwards on the clock a smaller clock appears that gives you more room on the home screen for information.
Clicking on the alarm icon on the home screen takes you to a finger friendly alarm clock setting page, much better than what we have seen before when the stylus was the only useful way of setting an alarm. Also there is a new world clock page.

Clicking the Windows key brings up the HTC program launcher, its a simple grid array of shortcuts to programs, you can add new programs as well as remove them but you cannot arrange them easily, the only way to arrange the icons is to remove them all and start adding them in the order that you want them, shame you cannot just drag them around. Clicking on all programs brings up a finger friendly list of all the installed programs that you can scroll through very smoothly. We could not find a way of just accessing the original Windows Mobile program menu without totally disabling TouchFlo 3D.

The contacts screen gives you a type of quick dial screen via pictures, you can flick through your contacts easily, click on a contact and a new screen opens up and you can easily see all correspondence with that contact, be it phone calls, text messages, emails etc.

Messaging and Mail tabs are pretty straight forward and give you the option of viewing your messages, or create new ones, nothing new to see here.

The web browser page is a launcher for Opera Mobile 9.5 with the added addition of the Push Page. You can set bookmarks here that will auto download / update web pages so that you don’t need to wait for them to load. For example you can set various pages to load up at 6am, you wake at 7am and can access those pages without having to wait for them to download as they already have at 6am. A nice feature but hardly a killer one.

The Calendar application is much nicer than the standard Windows Mobile offering, a nice use of colours make it stand out and now when you go to the day view your appointments are shown along with a graphical display of the current weather, this is a nice touch.

The stocks tab displays err stocks.

The camera application gives you a viewer for your pictures and launch buttons for the camera and video recording. The camera takes brilliant pictures. It’s an autofocus 5 megapixel lense and below are some sample pictures that we have taken, very impressed with the colours and exposure. The camera is also very responsive, one negative is the shoot button, or lack of it as it is an on screen button and makes it a little difficult to prevent camera shake when you have to press the screen instead of a hardware button.

Video recording is done in VGA, 640 x 480 and is not that impressive, a little jerky but ok for spur of the moment videos.
The music tab is an ok application and hasn’t changed since the original TouchFlo 3D, it is usable but Kinoma is a far better media player than this.

The weather application is again the best weather application we have seen, it looks amazing and again hasn’t changed from the earlier TF3D, that’s no bad thing as it still looks beautiful, and as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The final tab is the settings which is a finger friendly version of the standard Windows Mobile settings page, easy access to a lot of the set ups and configurations screens, click on all settings and there you are back in the standard settings screen.
Hey this is a phone after all, lets talk about that, the phone keypad is nice and large and easy to use, press a number and the phone beeps and gives a slight haptic buzz to register the key presses, an incoming call brings up a slide to answer / ignore screen and also displays the callers picture if you have one saved for that contact. You can also mute the ringer from this screen too.
Signal strength, seems pretty average fair, not as good as the iPhone on the same network in the same area, sometimes the Diamond2 completely dropped the signal where the iPhone never does, but compared to the Xperia X1 it is still a good performer. Voice quality was excellent.

You can also make video calls if your in a 3G area and know someone else with a video enabled 3G phone. To be honest it is not that popular and never has caught on.

Text Input
The standard QWERTY has been improved and now gives you haptic feedback and the letter pressed appears above your finger so you can see what letter you have selected, this makes typing a much better experience. Other input methods available are the phone keypad, the awful tiny Windows Mobile keyboard, Transcriber, Block Recogniser and Letter Recogniser.

Other Software of note

Internet Explorer Mobile 6
Well what can you say, this will be an earlier version to the version we will see with the release of Windows Mobile 6.5 and to be honest just as well. Its just not a good experience. It is slow, buggy and nearly unusable, pages are slow to open and sometimes flash works and most times it doesn’t. It totally bogs the device down to a standstill.

Google Maps
Other software to note is Google Maps and that works well with the AGPS, it acquires a satellite fix extremely quickly and works well without any noticeable lag. The actual screen of the device displays a really high amount of data due the the high resolution.

YouTube
The usual YouTube application that we have seen before on HTC devices is again present and it does work well so no complaints and it is certainly a better way to view videos than trying to use the IE web browser as mentioned above.
The rest of the software within the programs directory is pretty standard stuff like the RSS Reader, Office Mobile, FM Radio, Windows Live, Teeter, Messenger, Adobe Reader LE and Audio Booster.

So overall what do we think?
HTC have produced another excellent device, the handset oozes build quality with the exception of the plastic battery cover. The screen is simply stunning and the sensitivity of the resistive screen is the nearest thing to capacitive we have seen. It’s a joy to use and it’s a powerful phone too.

TouchFlo3D is a great home screen / overlay to the operating system and this time it does go that bit deeper which makes the whole Windows Mobile experience so much better. The flow of the icons and flick responses are now instant without any of the lag we had seen previously. The camera produced some great results in good light conditions and was much more responsive than previous HTC cameras, but the lack of a flash will render it pretty useless in poorer light conditions.

As a phone it worked perfectly, great audio quality, hangs onto the signal with above average results, the integration of contacts, text messages, emails etc is also another great feature. Battery life while not fantastic would easily get through a day of heavy use with push email, web browsing and moderate phone use.

Not wanting to dwell on the point for too long, but no 3.5mm headset jack is a pain and one omission that we can never understand or forgive, its just plain annoying now, especially as there is no adaptor included.

For a high end phone the packaging is not very impressive either and a few people are complaining about the lack of a case in the box, not really a problem as lets be honest who ever uses the stock case anyway, for a phone of this price and style it deserves much more.

So should you buy it ?, if your a Windows Mobile lover and don’t input lots of text this is the crème de la crème of keyboardless Windows phones, if you do input lots of text it may be wiser to wait for the Touch Pro2 which should be here in a few months. Sure it has a few flaws, like the accelerometer only works in a few applications, a better music and video player should have been included and that 3.5mm headset jack, the biggest flaw though is Windows Mobile 6.1, its just not good enough for this top end hardware and this is the kicker, HTC have confirmed that this device will get an update to Windows Mobile 6.5 and because of that, this device should be very appealing.

It is currently on sale for £ 394.00 so is actually cheaper than the Touch HD by roughly £100.00 so based on that it is good value as the specs are similar with the exception of the screen size which makes the device more pocketable and a 3.5mm headset socket.

Be warned though if your in the USA, this model does not support your 3G bands so if you import one your looking at an Edge only device.

BUY HTC TOUCH DIAMOND2 NOW