HTC Touch Diamond Cell Phone Review - Conclusion
|
Marianne Schultz Published on October 14, 2008 Comment on this |
|
|
|
|
Conclusion
On paper, the Touch Diamond promises the cellular equivalent of 007-level debonair style and efficiency, but it feels more like a junior agent-in-training in the end. It's remarkably capable with its Windows Mobile operating system, but the TouchFLO interface makes for a painful go-between at times, and we are eternally thankful that it can be turned off. There is a virtual cornucopia of 3rd-party applications available, so users will have no problems finding more ways to make the Touch Diamond even more relevant and useful for day-to-day use.
The Touch Diamond thrilled us with its subdued style, still image resolution, strong organizer capabilities, and extensibility. It disappointed us with its below-average battery life, lack of native MMS support and a headphone jack, poor video capture, and frustrating interface lag. Without a physical keyboard, the Touch Diamond is hard to peg as a strong business-oriented device, despite its Windows Mobile underpinnings. Despite its sharp VGA touchscreen, it doesn't offer particularly enjoyable video viewing, nor a seamless music experience, so it's not a multimedia phone that can compete with the likes of the iPhone. Given all of this, the Touch Diamond will only likely appeal to a very specific customer who isn't going to be looking for an email machine but still needs some messaging and organizer capability and wants a compact and stylish smartphone that can do a little bit of everything.
Business User
Without a full physical keyboard, the Touch Diamond is hard to envision as a busy business user's indispensable tool that can supplant a notebook computer in a pinch, and its relatively poor battery life to hold up under constant use on a crazy day doesn't help either. The only business user we can recommend the Touch Diamond for is the "lite" user who doesn't live and die by email and isn't on the phone a lot - these users will have a compact, stylish, and powerful phone on hand that can get them by easily on the basics to check email, view and edit documents, and be entertained during occasional downtime.
Budget Callers
At $249 with a 2-year contract and the need for a data plan to make life with a data-hungry smartphone remotely palatable even under normal use, the Touch Diamond is not even close to being The One for a budget caller. Period. And that's all we have to say about that.
Chatty Teenager
While the Touch Diamond is a nice-looking phone, it may be too understated for the average style-conscious teenager, and it certainly doesn't possess the battery life a chatty teenager will need to get through the average day. This combined with no native MMS capability, no chatty teenager will call the Touch Diamond their BFF.
Media Maven
The typical media maven will like the Touch Diamond's still image resolution, but definitely not the quality of its video recordings. Music and video playback work well, if not all that intuitively, and who doesn't like over-the-air music downloads? But the Touch Diamond is not as much of a multimedia powerhouse as some other phones out there, and the most demanding multimedia mavens will probably pass on this one.
| Previous Next | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
