Like most iPhone look-alikes, the HTC Touch Diamond’s marketing is emphasizing its unique design and interface. Its touch screen has an innovative new 3D touch interface, called TouchFLO 3D, providing animated access to e-mail, photos, music, weather, and more.
The Diamond’s dimensions (102 x 51 x 11.33mm) and the phone’s advanced features make it suitable for people who tend to use their phones for more than just voice calls or text-messaging. Like many other new PDAs, it comes equipped with a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS. The phone can also be used as a relatively decent camera; although the 3.2MP resolution cannot compete with high-class cameras, the optical auto-focus lens definitely places it among the better camera-phones available. Surprisingly, HTC decided to go for a relatively small 2.8″ VGA display (much smaller than the 3.5” of the iPhone).
The HTC Touch Diamond features standard WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity and can be used in countries supporting WCDMA, HSPA, HSDPA, and HSUPA while roaming. In addition to web browsing, the Touch Diamond includes a customized, new, HTC-developed, YouTube application for watching a variety of user generated video content, as well as utilizing Google Maps for mapping and traffic data. Another enhancement of the browsing experience is the option to zoom and pan websites with one-hand, automatically optimizing content that has been specially created to fit the display. Another handy feature is that the device automatically rotates the web page view from portrait to landscape view when the user turns the phone sideways, similarly to Apple‘s iPhone.
The internal memory of HTC’s new phone consists of 4GB internal storage, which unfortunately is not expandable (much like the iPhone). The Diamond includes a 256MB flash memory and 192MB RAM to ensure smooth processing of different applications. The Touch Diamond also includes a GPS system, allowing users to use map services. According the company, the provided 900mAh battery should suffice for up to 4 hours of talk time or up to 300 hours of standby.
TFOT has recently covered Samsung’s Haptic SPH-W4200, another ‘iPhone killer’, as well as several Smart Phones presented at the CeBIT 2008 Exhibition. Other related TFOT stories include Nokia’s nanotechnology morph concept, which was designed to demonstrate the future of mobile devices, and the cell phone microscope, which will hopefully make clinical quality microscopes accessible to patients in developing countries. You can also read about Reverse Phone Lookups which can help users prevent unwanted calls.
The HTC Touch Diamond will be available to customers across all major European carriers in June 2008. It will be available later this quarter in Asia and the Middle East. The North American and Latin American versions of the Touch Diamond will be available in the second half of 2008. For a demonstration of the phone, see this YouTube video; for more information, see the phone’s website.
