HTC Touch Diamond2 review

When HTC launched its very first Touch handset early 2007, it was also its very first release under the HTC branding.

Just a year later, the Touch Diamond, HTC's best selling handset of all time had stormed the market and made HTC the best selling Windows Mobile manufacturer yet.

Nearly a year on from that launch, HTC's second Diamond handset is preparing to take on the iPhone. With the second incarnation, HTC is hoping to duplicate the success of the first, while improving on the overall design and attracting a whole new range of customers plus the occasional repeat offenders.

HTC has shaken things up a bit with the next generation of the Diamond. Its physical dimensions are roughly the same, keeping the familiarity of design to those who were amongst the two million purchasers of the original phone.

The previous model boasted a 2.8-inch touchscreen with around a third of the front of the case being taken up by a control panel and its phone operating buttons. This time around the Diamond2 has increased its screen presence and done away with the large panel, making room for a much larger screen seen in its new 3.2-inch full screen touch display. The screen now takes up almost the entire front of the handset, making it a true ‘full’ touchscreen display.

As a result of this increased screen size, we found the Diamond2 was much better in handling, using and navigating than the Diamond. This is partly down to the new size, and the reworking of HTC's TouchFLO 3D user interface which is still very similar to the most recent HTC devices.

If you weren’t already aware, this UI in the past was more of a glossy interface on top of the drab Windows Mobile operating system to make it look a little funkier than before. This time around, HTC has integrated its TouchFLO 3D into the phone's operating system. In fact, it’s hard to even find or see anything remotely Windows Mobile-like in or around the OS, making it much more of a useful tool than ever beforehand.

There are some helpful new inclusions in this version of HTC's UI, such as the way all messages and even call logs are categorised and linked together by the same contact. In this, everything from text messages, to emails, to even when you’ve called someone are all shown on screen altogether, in a threaded format much the same way a forum is presented or how messaging appears on the iPhone and upcoming Palm WebOS.

This really simplifies the whole way messages and calls are presented and categorised, creating a much clearer and cleaner view than flipping back and forth from SMS to email in order to track all the conversations you’ve had. HTC has even mentioned it will become possible at a later stage to incorporate instant messaging into the communication screen, putting social networking and communication at the forefront of the device's purpose.

Another useful little trinket is HTC's Push Internet, which makes its debut in the Diamond2. Think of this as simply building on from an RSS feed for the phone, only with caching whole webpages well in advance. You can set up your most popular webpages to be brought down to your handset, ahead of schedule without tirelessly searching and waiting for pages to downloaded when needed.

There were some other welcomed improvements from before, such as in messaging and storage. Previously on the original Diamond, landscape mode really only worked on a few applications, including web browsing through Opera and picture viewing. With the new, larger screen size, entering text in landscape mode with a full Qwerty keyboard is just a much easier way of writing messages and a welcome feature.

The first Diamond boasted 4GB of memory, which was a good achievement at the time. On the Diamond2, HTC has dropped this vast size, but thrown in a microSD slot which wasn’t on the original and now leaves it up to the user in adding memory size. This is a good idea, as it lowers the cost of a SIM free model and memory isn’t hugely expensive now.

Also changed in the camera’s megapixel size, from a 3.2 to a 5-megapixel. The increased sensor size is a bonus, but there isn’t an 8-megapixel camera phone in HTC's arsenal yet, and this flagship model would have been the perfect opportunity for the company to up the ante.