HTC just announced their newest smartphone, the Diamond. The successor to the Touch, the Diamond offers some amazing hardware and software innovation that should have made it an iPhone-killer, but as with seemingly every Windows Mobile device, it suffers from a few design flaws that keep it from reaching its full potential.
First off, let’s look at the good stuff. The Diamond sports a razor-sharp 2.8 inch VGA screen. 480 x 640 pixels at that size looks almost like print, and the graphics on the Diamond are closer to glossy magazine pages than what we usually think of as a cell phone screen. Even the iPhone doesn’t look this good.
And the Diamond makes excellent use of that high resolution display with its new TouchFlo 3D user interface. A significantly more thorough replacement of the stock WM UI, this gives a clean, animated look to all the most common functions. Looking up contacts, scanning music or photos, checking time or weather can all be done from this slick Today screen plugin without going into WM proper.
The Diamond has a few other nifty tricks, too. It sports an accelerometer like the iPhone and rotates from portrait to landscape and back automatically. It’s got a completely new browser co-developed by HTC and Opera for a desktop-grade web experience. It’s got Bluetooth, WiFi and full HSDPA for connectivity. And it’s tiny, smaller than the Touch.
Sounds great, right? Well, not so fast. The devil is in the details.
The Diamond has pretty beefy memory specs for a Windows Mobile phone. 192MB of RAM is probably more than enough, even considering the additional overhead of VGA graphics resources, and the 256MB of flash is plenty for installing software. The Diamond also comes with a secondary built in store of flash totaling 4GB for all the music and photos you play with on the new home screen.
But that’s it. Just 4GB. The Diamond, like the iPhone, lacks any sort of card expansion. What you get is what you get. But even Apple doesn’t sell the 4GB iPhone anymore, and the 3G iPhone will probably come in 16 and 32GB flavors. Hell, I’m using more than 4GB of the 8GB microSD card in my Mogul. 4GB is far more than any other WM phones comes with stock, but it’s a strange limitation for a phone that touts media capabilities, and comes up way short on the spec sheet of the competition.
The Diamond has only one headphone jack, and it looks suspiciously like a USB port. The only jack on the entire phone is for HTC’s proprietary extUSB specification, which piggybacks audio pins into a slightly altered mini-USB port. Not only is this not an industry standard 3.5mm or 2.5mm headphone jack, it’s not even pin-compatible with Motorola’s far more common “audio crammed into mini-USB” jack used with the RAZR and other feature phones. Again, considering that the design of this phone and the UI that goes with it practically screams for media use, this is a puzzling compromise. If the included extUSB headphones aren’t up to your audio standards (or just don’t fit comfortably, not all ears are shaped the same), your only option outside of an adapter that manages to be both bulky and easy to lose is to use Bluetooth A2DP headphones. While this is an option the iPhone doesn’t provide, it’s also not likely to be acceptable performance for audiophiles.
The Diamond sports a 900mAH battery in its slim, sleek chassis. This is about two thirds the capacity one would expect from a media phone, and it’s even more confusing when you consider this is also a phone capable of push email. I realize Windows Mobile 6.1 is much, much more power frugal than previous versions of Windows Mobile, but I’ll believe this is enough juice to get an enthusiastic Diamond user through an entire day when I see it. I would have been much happier with even an 1100mAH battery.
Now I know well that mobile technology is a zero sum game. If you want to add something, you have to sacrifice something else. I know a larger battery, a standard headphone jack and a microSD card slot would all have added size to the Diamond. But my question here is whether that was a wise trade-off. These design choices in favor of shaving off a millimeter here and there may have relegated a world-beater device to an also-ran.
It’s far from HTC’s only device, and they have lots of phones that don’t have the Diamond’s limitations (but also, lack its benefits). But this is a phone clearly intended for the same kind of buyer that would strongly consider an iPhone. HTC has compromised on exactly the wrong features for the Diamond’s intended market. How many sales is HTC going to lose by getting right what the iPhone got wrong, but getting wrong what the iPhone got right?
2 Comments
Hi,
I totally agree. What you’ve said is exactly my thoughts. Im hoping HTC will make a version with a keyboard as well. No really! It won’t be nearly as super thin and cool, but it will be more useable. Currently I carry a HTC TYTN, its lumpy – about 190g, but I like it. And boy do I wish I had a version with a VGA screen!
It’s the screen that’s attracting me to the diamond and not much else. How hard can it be to put a little slot for a micro SD. Otherwise how am I going to get stuff in bulk onto the device. Don’t tell me to use active sync please!
Battery life is a big concern. Often you are using several transceivers at once. Hpsdpa and Bluetooth and gps for example start to really cane that battery. Also this device has a bigger screen and a faster processor than mine. That worries me. I think htc have gone for all out look and suavity that might not necessarily translate to usability.
Instead id prefer something a little less chunky than what I have now, with more function. I don’t agree that it’s a zero sum game.
There will be two sibling devices, the Diamond Pro (codenamed Raphael) and Diamond Dual. The Pro is a horizontal full-QWERTY slider that replaces the Mogul and Tilt. It’s about the thickness of the Tilt, but shorter and narrower (looks identical to the Diamond from the front). The Dual is similar, but a vertical slider with a SureType keyboard. Both should have microSD card slots.
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