HTC Touch Diamond Cell Phone Review - Intro
|
Marianne Schultz Published on October 14, 2008 Comment on this |
|
|
|
|
The HTC Touch Diamond sounds like smartphone heaven with its VGA touchscreen, 4GB of internal storage, 3.2-megapixel camera, WiFi, GPS, and compact size in a slick form factor. Its screen is really vibrant and easy on the eyes, and a lot of internal storage is becoming a necessity today in terms of the documents and media most want and need to keep on a smartphone. The camera records still images with very good resolution for a cell phone, though not so much at all with video. The TouchFLO interface is painfully unresponsive at times, and we thank our lucky stars that it can be turned off to fully reveal the powerful Windows Mobile behemoth lurking below the surface.
Even with all the email and organizer capabilities to keep up the most driven business user, it's still hard to picture the Touch Diamond as a business user's main squeeze without a physical QWERTY, and its battery life is going to be the weakest link with frequent use. The Touch Diamond is a little bit of a Renaissance phone in that it does a little bit of everything, but not everything or even a few things well enough to come out a strong winner. Read the full review for the details on why...
| Section | The Good | The Bad |
| Tour & Design | Professional and understated look, lots of included accessories | May be too short to hold comfortably for some |
| Audio Quality | Sound sent isn't too bad | Sound received performance fluctuates greatly |
| Imaging | Good still image resolution | Unexpectedly poor video |
| Making/Receiving Calls | Lots of ringtone customization possible | You'll go gray waiting for it to start up to make a call |
| Messaging | Email superpowers activate! | No native MMS, half-assed Picture Mail can only send pics to email addresses |
| Organizer | Robust calendar, contacts, and tasks capability | No Notes formatting to speak of |
| Multimedia | Music and video player is quite capable | Surprising skipping and lag on high-bitrate video files |
| Software | Loads of Windows Mobile apps are available | Dog-slow interface at times |
| Battery Life | Not really much good we can say here | Terrible web browsing time, less-than-average talk and music playback time |
| Connectivity | We love WiFi! | Not many CDMA networks outside of the U.S. |
| Hardware | Gorgeous VGA screen | No standard headphone jack. No soup for you! |
| Other Features | Tethered modem capability via USB and Bluetooth | Must pay to use GPS |
| Value & Comparisons | Best suited for the "business lite" user | $249 is a little steep for a WinMo device with no physical QWERTY |
| Next | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
