HTC Touch-Diamond Review - Usability & Performance

Usability & Performance

The Diamond functions well as a phone. It comes very close to matching the reception of my control phone, which I am convinced would provide a clear call from the bottom of the ocean, after being sent there with a baseball bat. The Diamond sounds fantastic, 95% of the time. I have driven around the city making calls, and put it to the test in an area that is notoriously shady for my carrier - all carriers, really. The Diamond has much better reception in poor conditions than comparable touch screens on the market. The included, wired headset offers great audio on both ends, but for some reason, its use seems to coincide with the reception issues I have encountered - probably because I put the phone in my pocket when using the earbuds.

Now for the fun stuff.  This phone is all about visual stimulation and physical interaction. TouchFLO 3D is an awe-inspiring user interface that sits on top of Windows Mobile Professional, version 6.1. It is beautiful, it is effective, and it is entertaining. Swiping your way through menus, navigating a photo gallery, rotating and zooming; the graphics are upper-echelon, to be sure. It's got fluid animations that rival the best, creative email previews that serve a purpose beyond their role as eye candy, and an overall visual design that is original and tasteful. I love the environment, and it really has me falling in love with the Diamond experience. That said, I need to cover some integration and conflict issues between TouchFLO and Windows Mobile.

Rarely, but often enough to mention, I found the two competing over how to handle unexpected (probably untested) situations. One scenario that exposes these conflicts is caused by entering bad info for your email account during the setup wizard. At the first attempt to check mail, Windows Mobile will bring up a notification screen with two text fields: one for user id, one for the password. TouchFLO responds to this by providing a QWERTY keyboard, which covers up the second text field. No scroll bar or tab button is available, and the keypad is immovable. So, the only way to resolve the issue is to manually go into the mail server settings and change them there. I had to run through this procedure 5 or 6 times, and it would have been much easier to just enter a new password and hit ok, repeating until I could guess it. It's just an example; there are a few more of these bugs crawling around, but nothing too serious.

The primary purpose of TouchFLO 3D, outside of turning heads, is to facilitate the simple navigation of the Windows Mobile software without ever touching the stylus. It is successful in this regard, for the most part. If you don't mind sticking with the default settings, you may never touch the stylus. However, If you have adult-sized fingers, and need to enter accurate text without moderate frustration, it's best to draw thine sword. Same goes if you want to dig a bit deeper into the Windows Mobile settings - to an area that TouchFLO 3D doesn't provide a friendly equivalent for. I don't dislike styli, but using one can be a hassle on the go. I think TouchFLO needs a tweak or two to make stylus use 100% optional.

The department I find the Diamond to be most lacking in is text input options. The Opera Mobile browser is the only application I can find that offers a landscape, full-QWERTY keyboard. With a screen this size, I consider the constancy of this option a requirement. For Email and SMS, the user that prefers QWERTY is stuck with an uncomfortably cramped keyboard that can, at times, be finicky - even with a stylus. There is a registry hack out there that enables landscape mode for these and other functions, but its existence is evidence of HTC's neglect in this area. As I familiarized myself with the phone, I got over the urge to type with my thumbs, but entering an address into Opera in landscape mode still feels like a cruel tease.

Speaking of Opera, browsing the web on the Diamond's somewhat diminutive screen is an absolute pleasure. Use of the touch-sensitive front panel ring as a zoom dial is a brilliant implementation and perfect example of how hardware and software can become one. It works the way I want it to; the way I expect it to.

Browsing the web in Opera, the fonts look amazing (as they do phone-wide), regardless of zoom level. Text re-wraps pretty quickly after zooming in or out, which can also be accomplished with stylus gestures. Working with small links was a bit frustrating at first, as I had to adjust my tap to the software. Some haptic feedback would be a nice addition (Again, hacks available). Moving around a web page was a breeze. The software was extremely responsive in terms of basic browsing and page navigation.

The Diamond's touch screen is so sensitive that I sometimes have difficulty scrolling through long lists of items without selecting something. This is the type of problem many touch screen owners would love to be burdened with. As with anything else a human interfaces with, there's a period of adaptation. Studying the Diamond, I am impressed by all of the hardware. It's high-end, top-of-the-line stuff.

The top-shelf accelerometers aren't properly taken advantage of by the software - as evidenced by the delay and unpredictability in the switch between standard and landscape mode after changing the position of the phone in your hand. I don't think this results from a bogged down processor, as I had the same experience no matter how many other programs were running. On the other hand, I could be underestimating the amount of resources being hogged by Windows under that pretty mask.

The sensitivity of the accelerometers in the Diamond is evidenced in a game called Teeter, which is simply the best display of orientation awareness and physical feedback I have ever experienced. These capabilities are not yet very well integrated into other apps, but It's important to note that I was testing a European version of the phone that has been out for a little while. I hope updates will resolve most or all of my software-related qualms, the first and foremost of which is the landscape QWERTY option, any and everywhere.

Other minor complaints include: a flash-less camera that produces yellowed indoor pictures (the snaps in the sample gallery were NOT taken with a Diamond), and the general vibe that HTC is discouraging text communications. Handwriting recognition seems to me a novelty that just won't die, whereas landscape QWERTY is a requirement, whenever doable.

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