HTC Touch Diamond Cell Phone Review - Messaging

The Touch Diamond has the strong email capability you'd expect from a Windows Mobile smartphone, though it's not very intuitive to use. SMS and IM work just fine, but MMS is a bit half-assed with no native support for this messaging type aside from Sprint's Picture Mail service that requires certain plan types or will just plain cost you more to use a la carte.

Supported Email Services (8.0)
The Windows Mobile platform is focused on business users, and therefore packs in a lot of email functionality. You can set up POP and IMAP email accounts on the Touch Diamond, and it already has the server settings for the popular email provides including AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. The Touch Diamond earns full points here. 

TouchFLO Mail pane

Push Email (3.0)
Windows Mobile devices support push email through Exchange servers, and the Touch Diamond is no exception here. It does not come with applications to support other push services, like Blackberry Connect, but such applications could be found and possibly used with the Touch Diamond.

Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The Touch Diamond supports multiple email accounts, easily handling our 5 test accounts. You'll have no problem taking care of email communication with the Touch Diamond if you have multiple accounts.

HTML and Attachments (12.0)
The Touch Diamond easily handles HTML emails and every email attachment we threw at it. This is par for the course for a Windows Mobile phone and definitely a requirement for the business users such devices tend to attract.

Email Customizations (2.0)
Despite its ability to handle push email, HTML messages, numerous attachment types, and multiple accounts, the Touch Diamond lacks customization in the email application itself to change font sizes and colors, viewing options, and more. The only thing you can really do is designate signatures to be attached to your outgoing emails automatically, which can be specific to each email account.

Time to a New Email Message (4.70)
To test this, we time how long it takes to go from the home screen in the unlocked state to the point where a new email dialogue is up and ready. On the Touch Diamond, this took 4.25 seconds, which doesn't sound like a bad time at all, but this still puts it in the middle of the pack among our comparison phones. The iPhone 3G beats the Touch Diamond by almost one and a half seconds, and the Blackberry Curve 8320 beats it by a whopping 7.51 seconds. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Email Usability (11.50)
The Touch Diamond's TouchFLO interface is pretty and displays some nifty animations when you scroll to the Mail application from the home screen when you select between multiple email accounts, but once you get past this, it's not very intuitive at all. The TouchFLO front shows the most recent message in an account in an envelope with the account's name printed on the envelope. Tapping on this opens the most recent message, with no way to immediately switch to view the entire inbox for that account. To do that, you need to go back to the envelope view and press the left virtual soft menu key to get to the inbox for that account. In order to see the inboxes for a different email account, you can tap on the Inbox link at the top left of the screen, which will show a folder view menu where you can choose the account to view, though the easiest way is to use the invisible D-pad surrounding the center select button and click left or right to go through them successively.

Inbox menu

If you want to view a specific inbox directly from the TouchFLO envelope view using the touch screen, you'll need to tap on the tiny envelope icon representing that account (and these are not labeled, so you'll have to guess which is which) on the right side of the screen, and then press the virtual soft menu key again to get to the inbox for the selected account. Using the D-pad is a little easier in this view - scrolling up and down will show the latest message envelope for each account, and you can go to the inbox you want with the left virtual soft menu key. Unfortunately, there's no way to view a unified email inbox for all of your accounts at once.

Once you're in an inbox for an account, messages can be sorted in one of 4 ways: by message type, sender, recipient, or subject. The Menu, accessed via the right virtual soft menu key, gives access to a variety of functions, including creating a new message, replying to and forwarding messages, and a Tools menu to manage folders, empty the trash, and more.

Overall, email is quite functional on the Touch Diamond, with no major changes from its predecessor, the HTC Touch.

Instant Messaging (4.0)
Just like its predecessor, the Touch Diamond has 2 instant messaging clients on board. The first, the  Instant Messaging application, is provided by Sprint and allows you to easily set up AIM, Messenger, or a Yahoo IM account. As with most carriers, instant messages sent with this application are charged as text messages, and we do not award points for this.

IM menu

The other instant messaging client, Windows Live Messenger, will work with MSN or Yahoo accounts, and will pull the log-in information from the email client if you have a Microsoft (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) or Yahoo email accounts already. This client uses data and you are not charged as if each message is a text message. The Touch Diamond scores 2 points for each IM protocol it supports here.

MMS Support (0.0)
Like its predecessor, the Touch Diamond leaves out native MMS support. This is still a bit odd since it continues to be a popular messaging option for many people.

Sprint does offer a Picture Mail service that allows you to send pictures and videos to mobile phones or email addresses, and it acts just like another email account that is already set up when you take the phone out of the box. However, there is a note on Sprint's site indicating that pictures and videos cannot be sent to other mobile phones from Windows Mobile devices, so the Touch Diamond can't take full advantage of this service. This is a half-assed way to implement pseudo-MMS functionality, and we have a sneaking suspicion that this is a way to wring more money out of customers since it requires a plan with this feature included, or an add-on messaging plan.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (2.0)
The Touch Diamond is exactly like its predecessor in this area again - smiley faces are not converted in sent or received text messages to graphical images. There is one change in this area in the Touch Diamond - the symbol keypad can insert 13 different smileys for you so you don't have to hunt down the multiple punctuation marks and letters needed to create a single smiley. Oddly, the Touch Diamond still doesn't display these smileys graphically once they're selected either.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (8.0)
When you scroll to the Messages application from the home screen, received text messages are displayed individually and you can flick up or down to scroll to the previous and next messages easily, and they rotate into view with smooth animation. Tapping on a message brings you to a screen where you can see a threaded view of previous SMS conversations, and a dialog box and on-screen keyboard so you can reply right from this view. You can also access text messages in the email application - it appears just like another email inbox with the same functionality.

Creating a new message from the main TouchFLO view is as easy as tapping the new message icon on the right of the screen. There's also a handy counter when writing a new message to let you know how close you are to the limit of 160 characters per message limit.

New SMS

All in all, the SMS interface is straightforward with a little TouchFLO eye candy thrown in for good measure. It's not as pretty as you'd find on the iPhone 3G, but it does the job well.

Time to a New SMS Message (3.16)
To test how easy it is to create a new text message, we time how long it takes to go from the home screen in the unlocked state to the moment a new SMS dialogue box is open and ready for input. The Touch Diamond took 3.17 seconds in this test, which is faster than its predecessor and the iPhone 3G and Nokia E71. It's just about as easy to get to as the email application from the home screen since it's the second application reached with a short swipe in the TouchFLO interface, and a new SMS icon to tap on the right. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

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