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DHL woke me up today to hand me a parcel. Inside was a brand new HTC Touch Diamond 3.5G smartphone. As my friends know, I’m a complete sucker for shiny gadgets and Touch Diamond certainly fits the description. I’ve played around with the phone for a few hours now; here are some observations.

It’s small. It’s really, really small. It’s too damn small! The screen, although full VGA resolution, is only 2.8 inches diagonally. Whenever you need to enter text, a virtual keyboard pops up from the bottom of the screen and covers ~75% of the screen - usually including the area you’re entering text into. Switching from a Nokia E61 to Touch Diamond has been quite a nerve-wracking experience, thanks to the lack of a real QWERTY keyboard.

Touch Diamond offers plenty of input methods to cover for the missing hardware keyboard. You can choose from traditional phone keypad, compact QWERTY (two letters and a symbol per button), full QWERTY, keyboard (full QWERTY with much smaller buttons, taking up less screen estate), block recognizer, letter recognizer and transcriber. I tested transcriber for a couple of minutes and even though the intro screen praised how reliably it recognizes handwriting, I was totally unable to produce a single legible word with it.

Where are those characters?

One massive annoyance is the lack of Scandinavian accented characters from all virtual keyboards. I write my text messages and e-mails (mostly) in Finnish, so those characters are absolutely essential. Sure, they can be located — by clicking the SYM button, then clicking the down arrow seven (7!) times for “ä” and once more for “ö”. How damn ridiculous is that? So if you received an SMS from me today, you know now why it didn’t contain any Scandi characters!

Doesn’t look like Windows to me.

Touch Diamond runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 OS. This is the first Windows OS phone I’ve used and so far it’s been behaving quite nicely. That said, the SMS/MMS application crashed once already, but worked fine a moment later without a reboot. The UI is surprisingly nimble and everything happens with a reasonably short delay. Ah yes, the UI. HTC has created something called TouchFlo 3D that acts as a nicer looking UI replacement for Windows Mobile UI. It gives quick and flashy access to most commonly used applications like calendar, clock, contacts, messages, internet, weather, camera, music and settings. Once you’ve set the phone up properly, you don’t have to look at Windows Mobile’s own UI too much. It’s quite jarring when that happens, however.

Touch it. Go on, touch it.

The phone’s called ‘Touch’ for a reason. That beautiful 640×480 screen happens to be a touch screen and, after some practice, it’s fairly easy to use with one hand. You can move around the UI by dragging a finger across the screen, for example. You can also zoom in and out of photos and websites by using finger gestures. For tasks requiring something smaller than a sausage-sized thumb, you can pull out a nicely hidden metallic stylus. Slide the stylus back into its lair and once its past a certain point, a magnet yanks it in the rest of the way. Nice little detail, that. The phone actually recognizes when you pull the stylus out. Do so in the middle of a phone conversation and a notepad pops up on screen, ready to take your notes.

Internet? Can do!

Touch Diamond supports HSDPA/WCDMA for up to 384Kbps up-link and 7.2Mbps down-link data transfers. My house happens to lie on the border of my service provider’s 3G network. Every single phone I’ve tried has struggled to get a proper 3G connection and Touch Diamond is no exception. Inside the house it switches between GSM and 3G almost constantly. On my backyard it locks on to a solid 3G connection and has no problem sucking in bits at a speed of 512Kbps, i.e. the maximum my data plan currently allows. While Windows Mobile comes with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, HTC has wisely included Opera for PPC v9.5.

OK, what else? It’s got two cameras, but no flash. The one on the back has an auto focus and a zoom function with 3.2 megapixels of resolution. The one on the front is designed for video calls as per usual. There’s a USB connector on the bottom edge of the phone, except that it’s not a standard USB connector, oh no. You have to use HTC’s special cable to charge the battery and to connect to a PC. D’oh!

Glossy, yet nasty.

HTC has opted for an ultra-glossy black look for Touch Diamond. Sure enough, it looks extremely cool… before you pick it up and start using it. The material quite simply sucks the grease from your fingertips. I’ve used the phone for a day now and ye gods, it looks nasty. HTC has kindly provided a screen protector and I suggest you use it to… well, protect the screen, but be warned: the protector does nothing to protect the phone from greasy fingerprints. Quite the opposite, to be honest.

Conclusions
Hindsight is always 20/20, eh? I should have waited for HTC’s forthcoming Touch Pro. It has a full keyboard which slides out from under the phone. I’ve been using Nokia E61 for so long that I simply can’t function without a proper QWERTY keyboard, and Touch Diamond’s virtual keyboards are a poor substitute at best. Touch Diamond is a cool toy for gadget freaks, certainly, but my needs require (even more so than I realized) a fast and efficient method for inputting text. Touch Diamond falls flat on its face in that respect.

Updates

Update 1: I purchased my Diamond from England, but I’ve since learned that HTC has a proper Finnish dealer.

Update 2: Thanks to XDA Developers forum, my Diamond now has Scandinavian accented characters in full and compact QWERTY keyboards. This sure made entering text messages and e-mails a whole lot more convenient!

All photos are © 2008 Petri Teittinen.