Mobile devices Toolkit

HTC Touch Diamond2 review

7.3

Editors' Rating

Design		8.0
Features		7.0
Performance		7.0

Bonnie Cha CNET

Published: 29 May 2009

As the successor to the Touch Diamond, HTC's Touch Diamond2 boasts a sharper, bigger touch-screen and an improved TouchFLO interface that provides easier navigation. We were also impressed with the general responsiveness of the device, and the 5-megapixel camera is a nice boost.

Design
There are many adjectives that could be used to describe the HTC Touch Diamond2's design. There's the usual sleek and sexy, but more than anything, we kept coming back to one word: sophisticated. The smartphone has more of a grown-up look with its brushed-metal face and a more streamlined look, making the otherwise attractive Touch Diamond almost look like a child's toy and the iPhone and Samsung Omnia look clunky.

The HTC Touch Diamond2 next to the Samsung Omnia.

Although it's smaller than the two aforementioned touch-screen smartphones, the Touch Diamond2 is ever so slightly bigger and heavier than its predecessor, measuring 107.9mm by 53.1mm by 13.7mm and weighing 117.5g (compared with 102mm by 51mm by 11.35mm and 110g). However, its profile is still slim enough to slip into a trouser pocket with no problem.

In addition, the smartphone has a solid construction and is comfortable to hold. The back is quite slick since HTC decided to go with a simple flat plastic battery cover — unlike the various versions of the Touch Diamond, which either had a geometric backing or a soft-touch finish. Although it's not a huge deal, we're slightly partial to the soft-touch finish as it gives the phone a non-slippery texture.

More than anything, it's the Touch Diamond2's WVGA display that's the attention grabber. It's bigger and sharper, measuring 3.2in. across the diagonal with a native resolution of 480 by 800 pixels. Images and text pop with colour and clarity, and the touch-screen is quite responsive. It also has a built-in accelerometer, which will automatically change the screen orientation from portrait to landscape when you rotate the phone. Note that this doesn't work in all apps, but does for web pages, email, photos and video. The accelerometer was fairly responsive — not instantaneous but no more than a second or two to switch.

The smartphone uses HTC's TouchFLO 3D interface, which, at first glance, looks to be the same as on the company's previous Touch devices. However, once you dig deeper into the menus, you'll notice some changes and added functionality. For one, you now get tabs for your calendar and stock quotes, and HTC has provided an extra level of customisation by allowing you to rearrange and remove tabs on your Home screen via the Settings menu. Of course, you can always switch back to the traditional Windows theme if you're not a fan of TouchFLO.

Another difference is that the Start menu now brings up a grid view instead of a list view of all your programs and settings — again, you can customise this page with favourites to give you quick one-touch access to apps and tools. Other enhancements include the capability to map an address onto Google Maps from a contact's page. The call screen also has a new on-screen answer/ignore slider button for incoming calls. Overall, HTC has added some nice enhancements to the user interface to make it much easier to use.

As for input methods, the Touch Diamond2 offers an on-screen QWERTY keyboard, including a landscape keyboard. The keys provide haptic feedback when touched, so you'll get some acknowledgment that the screen has registered the command. That said, we found the keyboard to be inferior to the iPhone's in that it's slightly cramped, which meant we made more mistakes or couldn't type as fast. It gets easier with practice, but we never felt 100 percent comfortable.

Below the display, you get a set of navigation controls as well as a new touch-sensitive zoom bar.

Below the display, there are four navigation controls: Talk and End/Home keys, Start menu shortcut and a back button. It's a little hard to see but there's also a new touch-sensitive zoom bar just below the screen that lets you (not surprisingly) zoom in and out of web pages, pictures, messages and documents. It works well and is certainly a quicker and easier way to zoom, rather than having to go through the menus or double-tap the screen.

The Touch Diamond2's landscape QWERTY keyboard features tiny buttons, which led to some mistakes.

On the left side, there's a volume rocker, while the speaker and stylus holder are on the right. The power button is located on top. The bottom of the unit features a mini-USB port that also serves as the power connector and headset jack. Yes, that means no standard headphone jack so you'll have to get an adapter if you want to use your personal 'phones or earbuds. On the back, you'll find the smartphone's camera, and there's a microSD expansion slot behind the battery cover on the left side.

Our review unit came packaged with an AC adapter, a USB cable, an extra stylus, a wired headset and a soft protective case.

Features
The HTC Touch Diamond2 is a quad-band GSM phone with HSDPA, EDGE and GPRS support. Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth (2.0+EDR and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets) and GPS are also integrated. HTC has also added something called Push-Internet Technology to help speed up the download and rendering of web pages, although we didn't necessarily notice a huge difference or any benefit to it.

The phone also offers a speakerphone, speed dial, smart dialing, voice commands, three-way calling and text and multimedia messaging. The address book is only limited by the available memory, and each entry can store multiple numbers, home and work addresses, email, IM screen name, birthday, spouse's name and more. For caller ID purposes, you can pair a contact with a photo, a caller group or a custom ringtone.

As mentioned above, the Touch Diamond2 has an integrated GPS receiver — and like the previous Diamond models, it includes the QuickGPS utility, which downloads the latest satellite information over the internet to help reduce the time needed to find your position. Google Maps also comes preinstalled on the device so you can see your location on a map, as well get text-based turn-by-turn directions, traffic data and conduct business searches.

For now, the Touch Diamond2 runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition, but HTC said at the Mobile World Congress 2009 that it will offer a Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade when the new mobile operating system is available. In the meantime, you still get the standard Microsoft Office Mobile Suite for editing native Word and Excel documents, and viewing PowerPoint presentations. In addition, it offers Microsoft's Direct Push Technology for real-time email delivery and automatic synchronisation with your Outlook calendar, tasks and contacts via Exchange Server and support for POP3 and IMAP accounts.

In addition, the Touch Diamond2 features Windows Live integration, the Opera Web browser, a dedicated YouTube app, a couple of games and other PIM tools, including Adobe Reader LE, a Zip manager, a voice recorder, a calculator, a notepad and a task manager.

HTC has upgraded the Touch Diamond2's camera from 3.2 megapixels to 5 megapixels.

Finally, while the music and video capabilities pretty much remain the same as its predecessor, the Touch Diamond2 does get an upgrade in the camera department from 3.2 megapixels to 5 megapixels. As before, you get a wide range of camera settings and tools, including white balance and brightness controls, ISO settings, flicker adjustment and various resolution and image-quality options. There's also a camcorder mode.

Picture quality is quite impressive

We were quite impressed with its picture quality despite some initial worries. The trepidation was because there's no dedicated camera key so you have to press the on-screen capture button, which we've found can cause some movement when trying to take the shot. Also, there's a bit of a lag between pressing the button and the image actually being captured, so we expected to end up with blurry shots. However, photos came out sharp and with decent colouring. Video quality was OK, although a bit dark and grainy.

Performance
We tested the quad-band HTC Touch Diamond2 in San Francisco using AT&T's service, and call quality was mediocre. We noticed a background hiss on our end and voices sounded tinny and far away at times, although we could still carry on conversations and use an airline's voice-automated system. Meanwhile, our friends reported some crackling on their side. Speakerphone quality wasn't much better. With the right-side speaker, the call sounded lopsided and there was some hollowness to the audio. We successfully paired the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and the Motorola S9 Active Bluetooth Headphones.

One of the biggest differences we noticed about the Touch Diamond2 was in general performance. With a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7200A processor and 512MB ROM/288MB RAM, the smartphone was quite responsive and felt downright snappy for a Windows Mobile phone. There was a bit of a delay with the camcorder and watching video clips, but unlike some other Windows Mobile devices we've tested, it never tripped up over simple tasks like menu navigation. Web browsing over AT&T's EDGE network was, not surprisingly, a little pokey. On the other hand, the phone's GPS receiver found our location almost immediately.

The Touch Diamond2 features an 1100mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 5.6 hours and up to 15 days of standby time. We are still conducting our battery drain tests but will update this section as soon as we have final results.