HTC Touch Diamond

The HTC Touch Diamond looks great as you can see it's not too large or small and has a thin profile, which makes it easy fit into a pocket. On the back of the Touch Diamond there's an interesting prism-like surface, which is a welcomes change to the standard boring battery cover you get on most smart phones. This is one of the most feature-rich Windows Mobile phones out there and boasts almost everything you'd need on the move. There's GPS that you can use with Google Maps and HSDPA and Wi-Fi, which makes browsing the Web and picking up emails fast and possible almost everywhere you go. A customised version of Opera Mobile also makes surfing the Internet enjoyable. It lets you see an entire page and then zoom in on the parts you want to see properly. Opera Mobile also lets you open new tabs, which means you can navigate through a few different pages without needing to open new windows. It's one of our favourite apps and it works well on the Diamond's ample touchscreen. Another customised app offered on the Touch Diamond is provided by YouTube. You can watch YouTube videos via Wi-Fi or HSDPA and search through YouTube's directory or just check out the latest videos. It seemed to load videos slowly using HSPDA and worked better using Wi-Fi. Picture quality on the Touch Diamond was much better than any previous HTC incarnations, thanks to its VGA screen. Still, it didn't look as good as on an iPhone because the screen isn't as large. If you're not in the mood for videos and fancy games instead, the Touch Diamond comes with a ball and hole game. It's simple, but very fun: you use the phone's motion sensor to navigate a ball into a hole by moving the whole phone. You can 'feel' the ball bumping into the sides of a wall and the pressure of it dropping into the hole. New games using the Diamond's motion sensor have yet to be announced. As for the 3.2-megapixel camera, it took passable shots in daylight, but the lack of a flash meant that photos didn't come out well in low light. Compared to phones such as the Nokia N82 or the recently-announced Sony Ericsson C905 -- both of which feature better cameras and xenon flashes -- we really think HTC has to up its game. While the Touch Diamond might look similar to the iPhone and have a few of the same interface features, this is definitely not an iPhone. The Touch Diamond looks slicker than any Windows Mobile device out there, but it's still very much a Windows Mobile experience. Every now and then, you're launched back into the familiar but fiddly Windows Mobile interface, away from TouchFLO 3D, and that left us deeply disappointed. We had high hopes that HTC might have cracked a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone that could compete with the iPhone user experience. It hasn't. We're genuinely disappointed that while the Touch Diamond might look great and have more features than a James Bond gadget, it doesn't come together smoothly. On paper, it sounds fantastic, but using it was ultimately frustrating.