Htc touch diamond touchflo gps 3g wifi smartphone

The phone has a connection wizard that detects the current SIM and offers to set up data and MMS settings automatically. Call volume is good by GSM standards, and we were able to hear our caller while standing on a busy city street.

The speakerphone is anemic though-- it sounds tinny and isn't terribly loud. It's good enough for in-car navigation assuming you're not driving a semi or a top-down sports car with an aftermarket free-flow exhaust , barely OK for a mall or convention hall and disappointing for music playback. Thankfully, the included stereo earbud headset is loud, clear and full sounding. We found compatibility and audio quality to be very good with both headsets like the Jawbone and Plantronics Discovery , and with stereo headphones like the Plantronics Discovery It does speaker independent voice dialing and you need not record voice tags.

It also handles quite a few commands such as "launch Internet Explorer", "what's my next appointment" and "flight mode on". It's accurate and works with most Bluetooth headsets. The Diamond family of phones have a neat feature that silences an incoming call if you pick up the phone and place it face down on the table when it's ringing.

There's no way we've found to disable this feature, but have no fear, if you forget and leave the phone face down on the table, it will still ring. You must pick it up and turn it over while it's ringing to silence the phone. ActiveSync 4. The Diamond supports mass storage mode for data transfer, and this also works fine with the Mac. In our tests so far, acquisition time is a little quicker than the original Diamond, though it's not as lightening fast as the Sprint version.

We got a cold start time of 30 seconds outdoors, and warm starts under 10 seconds indoors near a window indoors. We also tested CoPilot 7, which worked fine with the Diamond. The Touch Diamond has a 3.

Like the original Diamond, the back cover has a plastic window that sits above the actual camera lens, protecting it, though this one is larger. Image quality is very good as long as there's decent available light since the phone lacks a flash.

It can handle well lit indoor shots quite well thanks to the lens' large max aperture, but don't expect night shots to come out. Though the Sprint Diamond's orientation sensor was a little wonky, we had no trouble with the US Diamond, and images were saved in the correct orientation.

There are three autofocus options, and we opted for the easiest, which is pressing the d-pad's center button completely down to autofocus and shoot. Second, there's occasional lag, though we'd say that HTC did an admirable job of hardware and software graphics acceleration and as a result, the UI is much faster than you'd expect from Windows Mobile.

But nonetheless, there are pregnant pauses here and there, and that second it takes the device to draw the tab you've selected. Now our qualms: there are places you should touch and drag or swipe, and places you shouldn't for best performance. What's up with that? It's open season on every pixel with other touch screen phones and devices.

You see an icon strip at the bottom and you figure you should swipe your finger across it to scroll through the icons. Nope, it will be slow, jerky and oddly behaved. You must grab the current slightly larger icon representing the active tab and drag it to move through the icon list.

Do it this way, slow or fast, and the UI keeps right up other than that seconds it takes to draw the tab you end up at. Who knows. There's a welcome video that plays on the device and the hand model does it this way, but it just might not register that you really have to do it this way. Dig out the 10 meg PDF manual and it clues you in the box is too small to fit a printed manual. Or look not at the pint-sized getting started guide but at the unlabeled accordion fold-out pamphlet also small so it fits at the bottom of the inverted pyramid shaped box where it mentions this.

The best UI requires little if no perusing of manuals-- while TouchFLO 3D is a work of art and effective once you master its tricks, it's not brain-dead intuitive think of the LG Prada, LG Vu , Samsung Instinct and iPhone where you simply tap on an icon or drag and scroll at will pretty much anywhere. Now that you've got this simple concept down, throw it away when using finger gestures in each pane of TouchFLO 3D's UI: drag, swipe and scroll anywhere in the album cover music screen, weather screen or mail message inside its virtual account envelope though the required smaller up or down flick for mail messages is a little tricky for emails and it's too easy to open an email rather than scroll past it.

Lastly, unlike every other Windows Mobile 5 and 6 Pro Pocket PC phone, there's no way to switch between portrait and landscape mode. Yes, the device uses the accelerometer to rotate the display automatically in the photo viewer and Opera, but there's no way to set it system wide so we found ourselves stuck with portrait mode for Excel mobile, Word Mobile, NetFront 3.

Major bummer, dude. That also means you're stuck using the more cramped portrait orientation keyboard everywhere except the web browser. We do like HTC's enlarged QWERTY on-screen keyboard but the keys are still a bit small and the keyboard covers most of the screen so you often can't see what you're typing.

Note: the SKTools folk have made a free application that wil rotate the screen using the accelerometer in any application except HTC Home, Teeter and a few other places that you can download here.

Pick up the phone and place it face down on the table. It supports 3 orientations- right and left landscape and portrait there's no upside down portrait mode. It's a blast and it really shows off HTC's keen engineering along with the very accurate accelerometer.

Teeter is similar in concept to the game physical game, not computer game Labyrinth where you must tilt the device in all directions to get a small metal ball through a maze littered with holes. The phone actually varies vibration feedback when the ball bounces off the walls, matching ball speed with the resulting strike force. Normally we don't get into the whole unboxing schtick, but we'll make an exception for the Diamond, whose packaging is both beautiful and unique.

Call quality has been very good for us on both incoming and outgoing ends, and volume is average. The speakerphone is OK, sounding a bit thin and not terribly loud; but sound through the included stereo earbud headset designed to match the Diamond's looks is excellent and loud.

As you'd expect, the phone works with Bluetooth headsets and quality with the Jawbone and Plantronics Discovery was good. The phone uses Cyberon Voice Speed dial, which uses voice tags for voice-activated calling. This works with Bluetooth headsets and directly with the phone press and hold the call send button to activate voice dialing.

HTC's own speed dial pane called "People" uses caller ID photos or stock head silhouette icons if you have no photo with the person's name below otherwise those generic silhouettes wouldn't get you far. You can flip through these like album covers or scroll through the micro caller ID icons on the right side.

TouchFLO 3D makes direct comparisons to other Windows Mobile Professional phones difficult because it does affect device speed overall. It's running in the background even when using any of the standard Windows Mobile applications, scrolling through the Programs group which has the standard UI or opening menus HTC touches the start menu with an enlarged font option.

The Diamond's UI is at times very quick but it bogs down a bit here and there, then recovers most of the way. It's never as fast as the Touch Dual running TouchFLO classic but it's often fast enough to be very pleasant nonetheless. RAM - This is the type of memory that the device uses to temporarily store data from the OS or currently-running apps.

The more RAM available to the device, the better the performance will be when multiple or heavier programs are running. Capacity - The bigger, the better!

However, battery capacity is not the only factor that has an effect on battery life. Those include the chipset in use, the software running on the device, as well as the consumer's unique usage pattern.

Location - This field shows the positioning systems supported by the device. Just about my only real complaint with Diamond is its ability to rotate the screen between portrait and landscape is very limited. I asked my contact at HTC about this, and he told me that the Diamond was specifically designed to be used one handed. Using a device this way requires portrait mode, so they did not add support for screen rotation everywhere. It has the ability to run a huge number of applications written for this mobile OS, including tons of games arcade, racing, RPG, etc.

This is a consumer-oriented device, but Windows Mobile offers plenty of business features. These have been mostly hidden, but they are still there. And this device has plenty of power for running professional software. HTC has bundled the Diamond with a version of the Opera web browser.

As I mentioned earlier, you can easily zoom in on sections of web pages with the D-Pad, and putting this application into landscape mode is as easy as turning the smartphone in its side. This smartphone uses the standard Windows Mobile messaging software, but puts a pretty face on it with TouchFLO 3D, which is a nice compromise.

You can use it to check your email on just about any provider, including the big ones like HotMail and Gmail. It also supports Texting and MMS messaging. This makes it easy to keep track of conversations.

The Diamond is bundled with two separate music and video players. The Diamond also has a built-in FM radio, allowing you to listen to music just about any time for free. This requires that the headphones that come with the device be plugged in, as they act as the antenna. Speaking of the headphones, these are decent, and can be used for both music and phone calls.

This is good, as this phone uses a proprietary connector.