Design and Looks
The HTC Touch Diamond2 is not what you call a good looker. But some people will still love its classic 90s styling that's similar in more ways than one to the design of the Warm Silver version of the Sony Ericsson K530i. And certainly, it's the creamy silver frame and the boxy looks that lend to its classic styling. This time however, the back is plain unlike the jagged diamond-shaped back of the original Touch Diamond2. But it is just as much a fingerprint magnet as the one on the original.
The screen is small when compared to the phone's dimensions and we wish it could have been bigger. We believe this could be the result of the horizontal touch-sensitive zoom bar that's present below the screen and which takes up a good amount of space. It replaces the scroll wheel on the older version of the phone. Moving on, below the zoom bar are the four hardware keys that are quite tactile to the touch. The back of the phone sports the 5MP camera unit that is housed in a triangular silver plate like on the older Touch Diamond.
Reviewing the screen in detail, we see that it measures only 3.2-inches diagonally. On the up-side it produces WVGA resolution and features good pixel density. This translates into sharp and vibrant pictures but the sunlight legibility of the screen is still poor as it on other HTC devices. The screen's touch-sensitivity has been vastly improved despite being of the resistive kind and you may use fingers instead of the stylus for most operations.
The HTC Touch Diamond2 mounts the Windows Mobile operating system. WinMo is notoriously known for being somewhat user-unfriendly. But HTC have tweaked the OS by making it more touch friendly and added portions of their homegrown UI, TouchFLO 3D to make things more exciting. For one, users do not have to interact with the WinMo homescreen anymore as it is replaced by the Touch FLO one. It's only when you dig deeper into the menus that you run into WinMo. But the TouchFLO homescreen has tabs to most of the applications or functions so users may never really have to use the lower levels of the WinMo UI. These tabs include one each for contacts, music, photos and video, messages, email, internet, settings and a few more. Most areas of the UI respond positively to gestures like finger sweeps and feature nice animations.
The phone's telephony and call management features are good. The phonebook is extensive and there is support for smart dialing. The phone's speakerphone is also good and rest assured users will not miss any calls even during noisy environments. The headset that bundles in with the phone is only fit for calls and not for playing music or watching videos. There is also no standard 3.5mm audio port support so users are stuck with these headphones. What is really strange is that the Touch Diamond2 features some of the best audio reproduction we have seen; it makes little sense why they didn't offer users a good pair of earphones to go with the awesome audio quality or the option to connect standard headsets. To add insult to injury, the equalizer preset called Audio Booster is common to all applications and even third party ones; which is the trait of a really good music machine.
The phone's camera is a 5MP unit that produces image like no other on an HTC handset. The picture quality is great; the colours are natural and the detail, specific. The optics and image-processing combo is the best for a 5MP unit. On the flip-side video recording is poor and is done at either VGA or CIF resolution at not more than 15 frames-per-second. Strangely enough, there is no geo-tagging support for the pictures even though there is an onboard GPS.
Like any smartphone, the HTC has excellent time management and organizing features. We don't have to go into detail on this one as we're sure everyone's acquainted with this. Other applications include WinMo's Office Mobile application that lets users view and edit office documents and even PDF files. OneNote also comes with this suite. The odds and ends include a task manager, an app for streaming media, a YouTube client and an RSS reader.
In a nutshell, the Touch Diamond2 has been smoothened and polished to a much more fine degree than its predecessor. The WinMo OS has seen tremendous improvements without sacrificing its best features. While not the perfect music phone it combines excellent organizing features with good photographic capabilities.
Features
- 3.2” 65K colour resistive touchscreen display
- Touch-sensitive zoom bar
- Qualcomm MSM7200A 528MHz CPU and 288MB RAM
- 64MB dedicated graphics chip
- 5MP autofocus camera with superb picture quality
- TouchFlo 3D user-interface
- Windows Mobile operating-system
- Opera 9.5 web browser
