HTC Touch Diamond2 review Feature

It’s set to be a tough year for smartphones, and there’s plenty of
change afoot as companies battle amid tightening customer
purse-strings. The new iPhone is set to arrive over the summer; Palm’s
Pre is imminent, and Microsoft have the latest incarnation of Windows
Mobile waiting in the wings. Into that fray, HTC launch the Touch Diamond2, likely one of the last smartphones to use WM6.1 and an update to what was considered, when it launched a year ago,
one of the game-changing handsets of Microsoft’s platform. Can the HTC
Touch Diamond2 maintain that legacy, and will TouchFLO 3D improvements
sufficiently mask the aging OS? SlashGear set to finding out.





Physically, the Touch Diamond2 is larger in all dimensions than the
original Diamond: 108 x 53 x 13.7mm for the new handset, versus 102 x
51 x 11.35mm for its predecessor. It’s also heavier - 117.5g versus
110g - though that’s not noticeable in the hand. Across the front,
under the display, there’s a touch-sensitive scroll strip, under which
there are four buttons - send, Windows, back and end (which doubles as
home) - while on top there’s the power/lock button. The left side has
the volume control, while the right is blank; the thin stylus draws out
of the lower right-hand corner.
Round the back there’s the new 5-megapixel camera, and HTC have
abandoned the textured finish of the first generation handset for a
flat panel. Underneath there’s HTC’s ExtUSB port, which carries USB
2.0 and audio signals simultaneously but can also be used with a
standard mini-USB plug. Wireless connectivity includes HSDPA
(900/2100MHz) and quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900MHz)
together with WiFi b/g and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR.
Of course, the extra fascia space is given up to a larger
touchscreen, now measuring in at 3.2-inches versus the Diamond’s 2.8,
and running at 480 x 800 WVGA resolution compared to VGA. It’s an
excellent screen, bright and crisp, although the LCD panel appears a
little more inset from the touchscreen layer than other HTC handsets.
We’ve not noticed any particular usability issue presented by that,
however.
In
terms of the underlying OS, both the Touch Diamond and the Diamond2 run
the same: Windows Mobile 6.1. Where the former device debuted HTC’s
TouchFLO 3D, though, the Diamond2 brings with it the latest,
PeopleCentric version of the GUI. TouchFLO has gradually evolved from
a straightforward skinned launcher to an environment which hides most
of WM6.1’s key features. Where the previous version allowed you to
read SMS messages but dropped you into the standard messaging app to
reply to them, now there’s a threaded TouchFLO messaging system. This
is part of PeopleCentric: SMS is one tab of each contact record, along
with email and call history, showing you what contact you’ve had with
that person.
Other aspects, like creating or editing a contact, have had a
makeover too. There’s now a more finger-friendly way to add numbers,
photos and basic details to contacts, though anything more complex
requires you to hit ‘Advanced’ and drop into the old-fashioned dialog.
HTC have also kept an eye on upgrading the Diamond2 to Windows Mobile
6.5, with the the switch from a ‘home’ to ‘Windows’ key in keeping with
the demands of the new OS. Pressing that - or tapping the on-screen
Start icon - now jumps to the Programs pane of TouchFLO 3D, rather than
the standard pull-down Start menu. This is, according to HTC, more in
line with WM6.5’s default launcher, though for 6.1 users it takes a
little getting used to.
TouchFLO
3D’s changes have extended to various pop-up alerts and menus, too.
Gone are the standard app menus triggered by the lower-right softkey;
they’re now reskinned, better animated, much larger and support kinetic
scrolling. Similarly messages like the power-off warning and alarm
alerts have been redesigned, and look far more up-to-date. A
significant difference is in the behavior of the status bar: where
tapping that on an HTC device used to call up a pane of buttons, linked
to connectivity, battery status and the like, now it summons a single
Notifications page. This has a list of active connections, together
with alerts such as New Mail or Missed Call, but confusingly has
dropped the battery shortcut. This was always useful to check battery
status mid-charge; you now have to access the gage via the Settings
menu, an extra few taps.
Elsewhere there’s a new search bar in the browser tab of TouchFLO
3D, which saves a tap, and the new Push Internet feature. This allows
you to set up to four different sites which you regularly check, and
have the Diamond2 monitor them for you. That way, even without a data
connection you can read the latest version of the site that the
Diamond2 cached; you can select how frequently updates are checked for,
as well as turn off Push Internet altogether (or off when roaming).
Bear in mind, there’s no way to control how deep into a site’s links
the phone will cache; in our experience it’s the page you select and no
further, so any outgoing links will require a connection.
Also
new is the calendar tab, offering day and month views of appointments.
This is certainly more aesthetically pleasing than Windows Mobile’s
standard app, although it lacks either week or year views. Selecting a
date in monthly view flicks over to that day’s full schedule; however
creating a new appointment drops you back into the standard dialog,
rather than one of the new HTC pages. We’re a little unclear why HTC
spent time making the contact entry form so harmonious with the rest of
TouchFLO 3D, only to drop the ball in the calendar.
Other changes are smaller, though no less welcome. The email tab
now has a larger preview window that shows more text than before; a
subtle difference, but it makes quickly flicking through your inbox
more productive. The weather tab gains the Touch HD’s
four day forecast running underneath the larger current weather
indicator, making good use of the screen’s high resolution.
Incidentally, you can preview all of the excellent weather animations
by tapping first to the left and then the right of the Weather title.
In fact, as before there are plenty of neat touches. The stylus is
no longer magnetically latched, having a physical clip instead, but it
still wakes the phone when pulled out. Where the Diamond came with a
fixed 4GB of storage and no way to add to that, the Diamond2 has a
standard microSD card slot that, while requiring the back cover be
removed, can be switched without pulling out the battery. The
connections manager - which allows you to toggle on and off Airplane
Mode, the phone, Bluetooth, WiFi, ActiveSync and the data connection -
will also now take you into the individual settings for each of those
connections if you tap the icons on the left.
There are also, inevitably, some niggling usability flaws. HTC’s
on-screen keyboard now offers more straightforward auto-complete of
words - pressing space mid-way through tapping in a word automatically
accepts the suggestion - but, in the SMS app at least, no longer
auto-capitalizes at the start of a sentence. It does, though, in the
standard Windows Mobile apps. HTC have also added screen rotation to
the WM6.1 Messaging app, a much-requested feature, though it only
rotates to the left and showed occasional visual glitches; strangely,
the same rotation isn’t possible in HTC’s PeopleCentric version of the
app. Notifications are now redressed in the new TouchFLO 3D style,
popping up from the bottom of the screen, but the snooze tab - which in
WM6.1 let you choose multiple periods, from a few minutes to several
hours - now defaults to just five minutes.

The touch-sensitive zoom bar seems chronically underused. While it
replaces Opera Mobile 9.5’s on-screen zoom control (as seen on the
Touch HD), as well as in the photo viewer, it has no effect on font
size or anything we could find elsewhere. An obvious implementation
might have been volume or track-search control in the media player, or
paging through the TouchFLO 3D tabs, but sadly not. Another obvious
shortcoming is the absence of a 3.5mm headphone jack; we had hoped HTC
had finally seen the light after its inclusion on the Touch HD, but
that doesn’t appear to be the case. Adding insult to injury, HTC don’t
include the mini-USB/headphone-jack breakout adapter in the box.
Voice call quality is excellent, much better than the Touch Diamond
- which was never particularly a disappointment - with both parties
clear and well-balanced, even at low volumes. Similarly, Bluetooth
performance showed little echo, and range was decent enough to have the
Diamond2 tucked away in a pocket or bag. WiFi signal tenacity was on a
par with the Touch HD, itself an improvement over the Diamond, though
we noticed the occasional delay in connecting.
Image quality from the 5-megapixel camera is similar to that of the
Touch HD. HTC told us at MWC that they realize other manufacturers are
ahead of them in camera quality, and that rather than add a flash they
preferred to make some more meaningful software tweaks. There’s
perhaps a slight difference to shots taken with the Touch HD, but
lighting and simply holding the phone steady are more significant
factors. Snaps are taken quicker than before, though, and the camera
app itself loads faster; we miss not having a hardware camera button.
Media playback is unchanged over the Touch HD, with the same tab in
TouchFLO 3D and Windows Media Player still lurking in the background if
HTC’s own app won’t suffice. It’s a workable solution, but it’s
nowhere near as elegant as you’d find on the iPhone. For its larger
display and standard headphone jack, the Touch HD remains our Windows
Mobile media-playback phone of choice.

Overall, though, HTC have moved the Windows Mobile game on with the
Touch Diamond2, producing a handset that’s more attractive, more usable
and more integrated than those that came before it. Ironically, the
handsets they’ve just bettered are generally their own: sometimes it
seems as though HTC are the only Windows Mobile game in town.
At MWC, the PeopleCentric announcement felt like HTC’s answer to
Palm’s Synergy: a more connected way of handling information on a
mobile device. If we’re honest, it can’t quite live up to how Palm
webOS manages data, but it’s the best performing data management system
on a Windows Mobile device we’ve seen. The few consistency flaws we’ve
run across - which could well be fixed in production firmware - haven’t
undermined how useful it can be to isolate conversations on a
contact-by-contact basis, and if you’ve been looking for an excuse to
tidy up your address book then this is it.
The HTC Touch Diamond2 is, then, most of what’s best about the Touch
HD, with the compact scale of the original Diamond, and the cleverest
incarnation of TouchFLO 3D. That adds up to the best Windows Mobile
6.1 handset on the market, and one which is well-placed for the Windows
Mobile 6.5 upgrade later on in 2009.