digg this story
add to delicious
Our verdict on the HTC Diamond hardware (at least in it's European incarnation): GREAT. It's tiny, it has incredible screen resolution, it's snappy, and battery life is... just barely acceptable (but acceptable nontheless). We adore this little guy, it's just filled with nice and unexpected design touches. Setting the phone face down on the table to ignore a call: sweet. Having the screen turn on when you pull out the stylus: sweeter. Noticing that the outer edges of the Diamond are metal so you can just slap the magnetic stylus on the side of the device while you have it out: sweeter still. Not needing the stylus 95% of the time because the interface is designed to work with your finger both in TouchFLO 3D and even within classic WM apps: Sweetest.
More verdicts and a gallery of the HTC Diamond alone and with friends after the break!
More on the HTC Diamond
Our verdict on TouchFLO 3D, the Diamond's fancy new interface: Still a little too slow despite the fact that we're running the official ROM on it. Actually, here's the real deal: TouchFLO 3D is an great casual user interface. It's fairly 'discoverable' in that you can get how to use it fairly quickly. Although it's responsive enough, it does seem to give us fits every now and then when trying to get to a certain panel or swipe instead of tap. It's very, very pretty.
However the slight lags in the interface combined with the fact that it's not always as useful as a full interface make it tough to recommend to power users. We never went so far as to just abandon it during our testing, but we did note that when you do turn it off (it's just an option for the Today Screen), the Diamond felt like the fastest WinMo smartphone we've ever used.
One last verdict: Opera Mobile 9.5. Swoon... but maybe a stitch more resource-heavy than we'd hoped.
HTC Diamond Gallery
Awesome video. The "stealth" angles on the design are nice, and it has a very poshed up MS look to it (like Zune but highest end). The animations in the UI are great from an eye candy point of view -- how were they usability wise?
The lag on the touch was disappointing, however. Is that a release model or something they can still tweak? The bar on that stuff is now pretty near "instant" and anything else will cause eventual annoyance.
From an overall UI perspective, it looks about 90% there, but a little square and maybe a tad under fit-and-finished. Seeing the WinMob wait ball pop up without an alpha channel was epic fail.
Still, looks like there's a new king of WinMob Touch mountain. Be interesting to see your Treo 800w video to compare!