form CNET
Product summary
The good: The HTC Touch Diamond has a cool 3D interface and a beautiful touch screen. The Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone also offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a 3.2-megapixel camera.
The bad: The Touch Diamond is sluggish and call quality is subpar. The TouchFLO interface has a bit of a learning curve, and there's no expansion slot.
The bottom line: The HTC Touch Diamond offers much in the way of sex appeal and flash, and it's certainly got a formidable feature set. However, we hope HTC resolves some of the performance issues we experienced before the smartphone is released in the States.
Specifications: OS provided: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional ; Installed RAM: 192 MB ; Processor: QUALCOMM 528 MHzMSM7201A ;
Price range: $699.99
Features
Behind all the flash and pretty looks, the HTC Touch Diamond is at its core still a Windows Mobile smartphone. It runs the latest Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition. Since the Touch Diamond uses the TouchFLO 3D interface, you don't get the new Getting Started menu on the Home screen to set up e-mail, Bluetooth, and the like. It's still there but you'll have to go under the Windows menu to access it. Here, you'll also find your standard productivity tools, including a PDF reader, a task manager, a voice recorder, a Zip manager, and a calculator. Of course, you also get the Microsoft Office Mobile Suite for editing and creating Word and Excel documents and viewing PowerPoint presentations. As for memory, the Touch Diamond has 256MB ROM and 192MB DDR SDRAM and 4GB of internal storage. While we appreciate the large storage capacity, we're disappointed that there are no expansion capabilities, so keep an eye on this, especially if you like to store a lot of pictures and music on your smartphone.
Like other Windows Mobile devices, the Touch Diamond offers Microsoft's Direct Push Technology for real-time e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server. You can also access your POP3 and IMAP accounts, and HTML e-mails are supported. Using the Getting Started utility, we configured our review unit to access our Yahoo account and also synchronized our phone with our PC via Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5. Both processes went off without a hitch.
