HTC Touch Diamond2

Written on 3/02/2009 11:04:00 AM by poison_ivy

So, a lot of people have been complaining about their Touch Diamond, it's buggy and unresponsive but most of those complaining probably didn't upgrade their firmware and wants a phone that works out of the box. Hopefully, HTC learned its lesson that's why they're releasing the HTC Touch Diamond2.

Design

The most noticeable difference between the previous Diamond and the new HTC Touch Diamond2 is the bigger screen of the latter. The Touch Diamond2 now has 3.2 inch of touchscreen. It's also thinner at 13.7mm. The HTC Touch Diamond two has smaller physical buttons and no directional buttons. Hmm, I wonder how previous windows mobile games that requires navigational buttons will work on this device.

Features

Amongst the new features of the HTC Touch Diamond2 is the higher resolution camera. HTC equipped the HTC Touch Diamond2 with a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus. I don't know whether like the Omnia, the Touch Diamond2's camera will feature smile and face detection.

HTC didn't mention whether like the previous Diamond, the Touch Diamond2 will have a separate graphics card. Looks like it won't. The graphics card might be the reason why the previous Diamond is slower. There's still no TV-out on the Touch Diamond2.

Aside from what I've previously mentioned, the rest of the Touch Diamond2's feature is the same as its predecessor and these are: HSDPA, accelerometer, 288MB RAM, Qualcomm 528MHz processor, WiFi, Bluetooth with A2DP, FM radio with RDS, GPS, and Windows Mobile 6.1.

As for the Diamond2's performance, like the HTC Touch Pro2, the TouchFlo 3D has improved the Diamond2's interface. It's faster and more responsive but yet, you still can see some unresponsiveness at times and once or twice you see the ever annoying red, blue, and green clock of windows mobile. The auto rotation is still slow compared with the iPhone. However, these are just a few kinks and hopefully, it will be all ironed out come the production model.

Outlook

It's disappointing that HTC didn't feel the need to upgrade the Diamond2 much. With only a bigger screen, higher camera resolution and faster TouchFlo 3D, previous Diamond users probably will not upgrade. Besides, I don't see anything new with the Diamond2 that's not on my Omnia so those who thoroughly do their research will probably opt for the Omnia which will be cheaper by the time the Diamond2 will be released. And those HTC fanatics will probably wait for the Touch Pro2 rather than spend on the Diamond2 so that leaves a pretty tiny market for the device.