HTC Touch Diamond

It's a tough job overcoming the failings of Windows Mobile, but HTC has done a better job than most in recent times with its seriously sexy and potent smartphones. From the well-engineered Touch and Touch Dual to the all-singing, all dancing TyTN II, it has a strong record. But times change, and with the iPhone 3G just around the corner, can HTC keep it up?

The Touch Diamond, with its new TouchFLO 3D interface, tries as hard as any handset out there to mimic the iPhone's sleek, swish, multi-touch design. And unlike many other Windows Mobile devices, TouchFLO 3D completely replaces the Windows Mobile’s front end, making the traditional list-based design of the Today screen is a distant memory. Even our favourite Windows Mobile shell enhancement, SPB Mobile Shell, doesn't go as far as that. 

A large digital clock dominates the Home screen, complete with attractive animations – the numbers flip over from one to the next, just like an old-fashioned office calendar. Beneath this is information about alarms, a call history and upcoming appointments, plus you can expand on the display with a flick of a finger. Entries can be accessed with the tap of a digit, too, but this is where TouchFLO 3D steps aside for Windows Mobile.

TouchFLO 3D isn't just about the home screen, though – it successfully masks other important aspects of the Windows Mobile front-end, too. Stick your finger on the icon menu running along the bottom of the screen and drag it left or right, and you'll see similar pages for Contacts, Mail, text messages, Internet, Photos & Videos, Music, Weather, Programs and Settings fly by in a blur.

All of screens offer similar levels of Windows Mobile customisation and graphical baubles. The Mail page features an open envelope with the first few lines of your most recent message poking out – drag your finger downwards and the previous message is displayed.

On the Music screen, album art is displayed on an animated rolodex, aping the iPhone's Coverflow display; and a similar approach is taken to favourite contacts, with portraits attached to your favourite people displayed in finger-navigable format. In fact the only remnants of Windows Mobile, at least for much of the time you use the Touch Diamond, are the status bar at the top of the screen and the two 'soft', context sensitive, buttons at the bottom.

The Touch Diamond is also notable in that it includes the latest version of Opera Mobile, tweaked to integrate it with TouchFLO 3D. Opera Mobile 9.5 is a brilliant mobile web browser – you can't perform multi-touch pinches to zoom in and out, but the overview and double-click-to-zoom approach works almost as effectively. If you want to fine tune your zoom level, simply sweep a finger around the round select button, just below the screen.

Opera Mobile’s page rendering is extremely reliable, too. Websites that don't quite work on the iPhone's Safari browser are fine here, and the Touch Diamond's 480 x 640 screen means you can actually read text, such as BBC News’ weather summary on the, when you're fully zoomed out. Awesome is not a word we use very often, but this browser is precisely that.

The Touch Diamond is very pocketable and it's significantly less of a burden on your pocket than the iPhone. HTC has also done its utmost to squeeze as much hardware into the Diamond's svelte frame. The processor is a 528MHz Qualcomm unit and there's 192MB of RAM, along with 4Gb of internal storage.

As well as GPS, the Touch Diamond also has an accelerometer that detects when the phone is flipped on its side and rotates the screen’s image accordingly – just like the iPhone, in fact. The feature is exploited wonderfully (and aided by vibrating haptic feedback) by a strangely addictive marble maze game where you tip the phone up to roll a ball around, avoiding dropping it down awaiting holes as you go.

But while the Touch Diamond is sexy, slim and stuffed with features, it feels like a rushed product – and that’s not what a phone attempting to compete with Apple's best effort can afford to be. The finish is not polished – the flush front fascia looks plasticky and the multi-faceted 'diamond' back plate feels cheap. A big disappointment considering how well made the Touch, Touch Dual and TyTN II were.

Given the excellent mobile web browser, it's also frustrating that entering text is much more difficult than it should be. We liked the variety of text entry methods on offer – there’s a choice of numeric keypad, compact 20-key Qwerty and full blown Qwerty keyboards – but text-entry boxes often disappear behind the input panel – a basic problem that should have been caught early on.

There's also the irritation that despite the Diamond's multimedia pretensions, HTC still insists on using a USB port for the stereo headset connection, which means you can’t use your own earphones for listening to music.

A bigger problem is that the 4Gb of internal memory can’t be expanded, since there’s no memory card slot. 4Gb of onboard storage is certainly generous, but not being able to expand it is a serious failing. And the biggest issues are yet to come.

The first is that the Touch Diamond is sluggish. Sweep your finger across the screen and animations can take half a second to spring to life. Tap the internet icon, and the page often delays before it finally deciding to appear. The animations themselves often look jerky and that automatic screen reorientation is not 100% reliable. You can adjust the bias from battery saving to processor speed, which improves matters a little, but it's still prone to frequent delays.

And this brings us to the second big problem with the Touch Diamond – the battery. In order to squeeze everything in to the handset, the battery has clearly suffered. Despite the big, beefy processor, there's only a tiny 900mAh lithium ion unit inside to provide power and that's just not enough for a Windows Mobile device.

You'll struggle to get more than two days use out of the Touch Diamond and if you start browsing the web intensively, listening to music or doing anything other than making and receiving the odd phone call, that figure will fall dramatically.

The HTC Touch Diamond is certainly a neat little handset – the TouchFLO 3D is slick and attractive, and the crisp VGA screen is a joy to behold. But the poor battery life and pedestrian performance make it a less than ideal addition to any pocket and if you’re hungry for a multimedia smartphone with similar features, we’d advise hanging on for the iPhone 3G.