That’s because the new battery is a lot thicker than the original one, and practically doubles Hero’s girth. My previously slim Hero now looks like it’s about to give birth. Oddly enough I found the new fatter Hero feels somewhat more comfortable in hand than the original slim one. It doesn’t feel more comfortable in a trouser pocket, however.

According to the instructions, I was supposed to first charge the battery in the phone for 12 hours… so I did. I know, me following instructions!? It’s a crazy world. Furthermore, the instructions also say that after that first charging I should use the phone until the battery is running very low, then recharge. By repeating this procedure a few times I should have a longer-lasting battery, I suppose. To my surprise, it took the battery almost five days to run down to 15% which is when Hero starts making a fuss about recharging. The phone was on 24 hours a day and saw lots of heavy use, including 12+ hours of talking and plenty of browsing the internet via HSDPA. The original battery wouldn’t have lasted a day in similar conditions. Despite adding weight and volume to the Hero, I have to say I’m very pleased with the new battery and how it has transformed the way I use my Hero.

So, I naturally hesitated a bit when pondering on the possibility of forking over several hundred Euros for another HTC product. But then I read some encouraging articles about Google’s Android OS and never looked back. The phone arrived on Friday and I spent several hours getting to know it intimately (hur hur) that night. It was, in a word, a revelation. My trusty Nokia E71 feels like a clunky dinosaur and a downright embarrassment next to the Hero. I now understand why people have been so excited about the iPhone. Now, I’ve never used an iPhone – and with the Hero in my hands I probably never have to, either.

Allow me to rattle off some main features really quickly. It’s got a 3.2 inch touch screen with 320×480 resolution, haptic feedback, internal GPS, HSPA/WCDMA support for up to 7.2 Mbps data download, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi 802.11b/g, a 5.0 megapixel camera with auto focus, a proper 3.5 mm audio jack, 165 MB of RAM for applications and comes with a 2GB SD memory card.

Unfortunately you can’t install applications on the SD card — but that 165 MB goes a surprisingly long way, simply because the apps are quite small. At the moment, I’ve got 42 applications installed and there’s still 116 MB of memory left for more apps. The SD card is there as data storage for applications as well as for your music, photos and videos.

I purchased my phone at a UK webstore who shall remain nameless. As expected, the phone’s virtual keyboard did not have Scandinavian accented characters. I could get to them by holding down A and O, but it’s not the same thing. A quick Google search informed me some friendly Norwegian chap had created a Scandinavian keyboard for Android. This led to my first dip into the waters of Android Market.

It’s… well, it’s like the iPhone app store, I guess. Market offers hundreds of games and applications, most of them free. Actually, I don’t see any paid apps at all, but that’s because those haven’t been rolled out in Finland yet. Anyhoo, applications are sorted into several categories such as communication, entertainment, finance, lifestyle, multimedia etc. Downloading and installing them is extremely easy: you just tap the name of the app you’re interested in, read its description and, if you’re so inclined, tap the install button. The phone downloads and installs the app(s) in the background, even if you exit the Market.

Locating the Scandinavian keyboard was easy thanks to a Search function. A few seconds later I was using a virtual keyboard with Scandinavian accented characters in their correct places. Unfortunately the new keyboard has even narrower keys than the standard one, and those weren’t wide enough for my fat fingers. The virtual keyboard remains my biggest gripe with the Hero. Nokia E71 has a QWERTY hardware keyboard which spoiled me rotten. Typing on the E71 is very fast and there’s almost no chance of typos. Not so with the Hero. Having used the phone for three days I’m still making way too many errors; text messages typed and sent in less than 10 seconds on the E71 take 2-3 times longer on the Hero. I’ve read of better keyboards for Android but those seem to be paid apps and thus unavailable to me for the time being.

While we’re listing gripes, here’s another one: battery life. The phone comes with a 1350 mAh Li-ion battery which should have a standby time of up to 440 hours (says HTC). I’m not saying that’s impossible, but to achieve that I’m pretty sure you have to disable most of the phone’s features. Like, absolutely everything.

As I mentioned, the phone arrived last Friday. It’s now Sunday evening, and I’ve already ran the battery dry twice – and it’s at 16% right this very moment. There’s a good reason for all this and it’s called WiFi. You see, some of the apps I’ve installed wish to have constant access to the internet by default. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, Weather, Stocks, email and various others like nothing better than sucking bits off the internet constantly. And since I have several WiFi APs in my house, I let them. (Hah! Hero just beeped to announce the battery’s at 15% and recommends I attach it to a charger. Good timing!) To save battery, I’ve switched the WiFi off for the night. Regardless of that, I’m now charging the battery for the third time in three days. With the WiFi on, you can expect the battery to last for 10-12 hours while using the phone actively. You can extend battery life by telling apps to refresh less often or by setting them for manual refreshes only.

That’s the biggest gripes done with. Let’s talk a bit about how bloody great this phone is. First, the UI. It looks gorgeous, it’s fast and responsive, and although it has a habit of stuttering briefly every now and then, I have to say I love it. Swiping your finger horizontally across the screen brings up more home screens, all of them completely open for user tinkering. You can very easily change the screen layout, delete app shortcuts, add new ones, change the wallpaper etc. You can do a lot of customization on this baby, that’s for certain. You can tweak the phone even further by buying a replacement Home (the UI, in other words) application, if the internet is to be believed. In fact, the phone comes with two different Homes: the default one is called HTC Sense, and if you keep the Home button pressed down for a few seconds, you can switch over to standard Android UI.

The touch screen supports more than one pressure points. This means you can zoom in and out by placing two fingers on the screen and doing a ‘pinch’ or a ‘separate’ move with them. You can also double tap to zoom in and out of a webpage quickly. Yeah, I’m aware this is nothing new to all you iPhone users out there, but do bear in mind I come from Nokia E71 with a Symbian OS.

I also like the trackball. It can really speed up navigation when used simultaneously with the touch screen. It also has a very nice, very hi-resolution granular feel to it under my thumb. You can also press it to select things, like clicking a mouse button. Aaaand it also lights up and blinks to notify you of incoming messages and other stuff.

But by far the nicest thing about the Hero has to be the Android Market. It offers such a wide variety of truly useful applications, and most of them are totally free! I’ve already expanded the phone’s feature set immensely by adding a bunch of apps. Sure, some of them run tiny ads at the bottom of the screen, but so far they’ve been very unintrusive. I’ve also bumped into a few ‘lite’ versions that have been stripped of some of the features available only in the full, paid version. That does irk a bit, but only because paid apps aren’t available in Finland yet. I can easily see myself paying a Euro or two for a useful app so how about rolling them out in Finland already, Google? I’m waiting, with money in hand.

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!

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