This phone wants itself a business phone, but the HTC Diamond would be ideal for multimedia too. Diamond is competing with the iPhone. Among its strengths, we find the design, the connectivity and the Windows Mobile. The device is one of the best-looking terminals with this operating system, which is also due to the TouchFLO 3D interface. We will find out more about the smartphone from this HTC Diamond review.
<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->
HTC Diamond is a candybar that measures 102 x 51 x 11.5 mm and weighs 110 grams. As expected, the front side is occupied by 2.8-inch screen, a touchscreen actually, with a resolution of 480 x 640 pixels and 65,000 colors. Above the screen, we find the speakerphone, the light sensor and a secondary VGA camera for videoconferencing. Of course, there will be plenty of people, who will think that the fact that HTC Diamond has a screen with only 65,000 colors will be a major minus for the phone. However, no one noticed the differences between a screen with 65,000 colors and one with 16 million with the eye and the image captured on Diamond's screen is one of the best that can currently be found on the mobile market.
Only the 3.2 megapixel camera occupies the back side of the phone. The plastic surface is shaped in such a way that makes the surface look like a polished diamond, which looks very good, but is not always beneficial. From here, the phone gets the name of Diamond. Here, we should also mention that the battery is under the glossy cover. A standard Lithium-Ion battery, powers HTC Diamond. It has a capacity of 900 mAh, which in theory holds in standby mode up to 285 hours and up to 5 and a half hours in talk time. Unfortunately, this leaves much to be desired. After several hours of charging, from the first few minutes of surfing the web and the menu, the battery started to show signs of fatigue. The good news is that HTC has announced a better version of the battery for this terminal with a capacity of 1350 mAh.
Being a HTC, Diamond runs Windows Mobile operating system, the latest version 6.1. With TouchFLO interface, the HTC Diamond manages to bring the audience a more than original combination. The phone menu can be navigated by touching the screen or using the wheel / navigation button on the D-pad.
HTC Diamond activates the screen when the stylus is out of its slot. Other methods do not exist, and at some point, this becomes annoying. The HTC Diamond's standby screen displays the time, the ringer status, the call menu, the calendar and the submenus: People, Messages, e-mail, Internet, Photo / Video, music player, weather, settings and programs. However, this is only the TouchFLO user interface. At the top of the screen, we have the Windows toolbar.
Because HTC Diamond is running the Windows Mobile operating system, we no longer have to deal with the normal matrix menu. This one is still placed on the main screen (Home Screen). Instead, we have to navigate through the menu that is activated from the Windows Start button, on the top left. The user has available the Office Mobile suite, Calendar, Contacts, Internet Explorer, Messaging, Phone, Programs, Settings and Help menu. Even if it has Internet Explorer browser, HTC Diamond comes with Opera Mini preinstalled. It can be found in the Programs menu, where users also find programs like Windows Media player classic, MSN Messenger, YouTube, or GPS. The Office is composed of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word, plus the "moral support" from Java, ZIP and Adobe Reader.
As a business phone, HTC Diamond’s music player presents itself very well. As a multimedia phone, things are not so pink, but only when music is played through the external speakers. The problem is that the sound is not the best possible at whatever volume level you will set the phone. However, once the headphones are attached, things will change radically. The sound played by the headphones is very good. Even if you set the maximum volume level, you will not have problems.
However, Diamond's headphones are not the most comfortable. Those with small ears are likely to fail in fixing them and after some time it can become painful to wear them. In addition, we again face the problem that there is no 3.5 mm jack, the phone only supporting the proprietary HTC headphones. The handsfree is located on the headphones wire. This is actually the main purpose of these headphones.
If you got tired of the music stored on the 4 GB of internal memory, you can also try the FM radio. Of course, you need to attach the headphones, because as with other phones, the headphones become the antenna.
The camera available on HTC Diamond has 3.2-megapixels. That means it can capture images at a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. In addition, the camera has autofocus, a function that makes us happy. It would have been great if the phone would have had a flash, but it is missing. The picture quality is not very good, but the image noise is kept under control quite well and the autofocus does its job well. The only problem is that the target tends to capture the image too bright.
As for the photo gallery of the terminal, here we have one of the most beautiful ways of displaying the images and this is due to the TouchFLO interface. We have a phone with 3D interface. The user can choose to navigate the gallery by simply gesturing with his finger on the screen up or down, the images being displayed in 3D. Unfortunately, this action is not always the most accurate, but with a little exercise you get used to it.
The camera is also able to make videos. The maximum resolution for video capturing is VGA and the clips will be saved in MP4 format. Like the iPhone, HTC Diamond is a true portable video player. The terminal supports Windows video formats, but anytime you can install a package of codecs, which supports DivX or XviD videos.
HTC Diamond has GPRS Class 10 with download speeds ranging between 32 - 48 kbps, EDGE Class 10 with download speeds of 236.8 kbps, 3G HSDPA (7.2 Mbps), Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g, Bluetooth version 2.0 with A2DP and a miniUSB port. Surfing the Internet is easy, because HTC Diamond has the Windows browser, Internet Explorer and Opera Mini or the WAP 2.0, which supports XHTML and HTML. In addition, you can zoom in to read texts easier.
From this HTC Diamond review, we found out that both as a smartphone, as well as a multimedia terminal, Diamond is doing great. It gets points for its compact look, its connectivity capabilities, for its TouchFLO interface and especially for its screen, which is able to display colors in a special way. It gets minuses for the surface that attracts fingerprints, the external speakers that do not play a good sound or for the headphones that cannot be replaced. The fact that Diamond can be unlocked only by removing the stylus from the slot is another inconvenience. However, once you have the virtual keyboard at hand, HTC no longer presents mysteries for you and you will discover the fact that the terminal is worth the money. The ones who vary between an iPhone and a Diamond would do well to think twice about why would they want an iPhone, because Diamond is a competitor more than capable.
