HTC Touch Diamond Review

Overall Rating

Style, TouchFLO 3D, Opera browser, range of software available, HSDPA/EDGE, GPS, WiFi

Noticeable TouchFLO 3D lag increasing throughout the day until reboot-time, Opera browser, MS WM6.1 operating system, battery life, non-standard headphone connection

The HTC Touch Diamond suffers from a steeper depreciation of appreciation than most phones I've owned. I loved it for the first couple of weeks. Then slowly, reality set in. This phone usually needs to be rebooted once a day. This appears to be due to the utterly inefficient and buggy WM6.1, which loses memory space faster than an ageing senile pensioner. And perhaps because TouchFLO 3D sits prettily on top of this stinking heap of "because I say so" OS design, it soon starts slipping off and not looking so pretty. Or is it that it is partly built using an arguably amateurish technology called LUA? You see, this HTC hardware just doesn't have the muscle to shift the humongous clumsy beast that is WM6.1 and TouchFLO 3D ensembled. This is the case when you swipe the screen... and... wait... for... the... next page to load. Except it takes longer even than the effort it just took you to read that sentence.
Another example is when you hang up on a call. You hang up the call. You hang... You hang up... You HANG UP THE CALL!! Wow! How hard can it be to hang up a call?! And I won't even begin to tell you how long you have to wait until the camera starts up so you can take a photo. Suffice it to say that by the time you're ready to take the photo, not only have all smiles crystallised on your friends' faces, but they've probably already packed their bags for their next holiday. Oh and you'll realise that you don't even have a photo-assist light to try to make a photo of some vague silhouettes of people who may look a little like your friends. A flash you say? What luxury that would be!
Textual input is also not always a delight. If you have your phone using the built-in on-screen Phone Keypad, you may be able to get away with typing relatively fast. If the system hasn't slowed to a crawl, that is, and starts swallowing letters and spaces like a hungry beastie. You can forget any other mode of input, however, if you want to finish that text message some time today. Oh and for precise positioning of the cursor, say to insert a word in the middle of your text, forget using your finger. Bring out the stylus and save yourself countless attempts.
Nonetheless, there are loads of nifty features in there to save your day, such as Google Maps working very well with GPS (internet connection required via your mobile network provider), email on the go (er... internet connection required for this to work as a truly email-anywhere concept), a top-tier web browser (did I mention the internet connection requirement?)... Although, pausing there for a moment, Opera, the included web browser, is also a slight disappointment in the long term usage, as it is a tad idiosyncratic and even buggy. But it is soon forgiven when I cast an eye at WM6.1's built-in Pocket Internet Explorer - now that IS a horror!
I SO want to like this phone. I DO! It's just that, well, the battery life, I mean, to not even last through a day of normal usage?! It doesn't! And having to reboot the phone more regularly than a PC because TouchFLO 3D slows down to a sleepy snail's pace is not my idea of fun.
On the plus side, you'll love the 30 seconds of awe you'll get from your friends when you show them the front home screen, swipe through to the message page, and show them the swish effect of moving to the next message, then on to the weather page, and finally when you let them play with Teeter (which I played perhaps 3 times in the 4 months I've had the phone, although admittedly for almost an hour at a time).
And then you'll probably start dreaming of what the next iPhone will be like, or perhaps how Microsoft should be spanked hard until it really hurts and they start to produce a version of Windows Mobile that is actually more like what Vista is to Mac OS X. And you'll forget the Diamond, much like you moved on from that brief encounter with that ultra-sexy redhead so long ago. Until you have to reboot or your battery dies, that is.