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HTC Touch Diamond2.
HTC is one of the most ruthlessly competitive mobile phone manufacturers in the world. Witness
the new HTC Touch Diamond2 - an upgrade to the already impressive HTC Touch Diamond,
and a phone that will give some of HTC's competitors a fright.
The first thing that you may notice is that the Touch Diamond2 doesn't look very much
like the old Touch Diamond, The older phone was a glossy, somewhat whacky design and a
real fingerprint magnet. The new Touch Diamond2 is altogether more restrained and is a very
attractive looking phone that should have a wide appeal.
The main change is the display - this is now a 3.2" 480 x 800 pixel touch-sensitive panel,
considerably better than the 2.8" 480 x 640 pixel screen on the older handset. The Touch
Diamond2 is roughly the same size as the Touch Diamond, so the front of the phone has been
redesigned, losing the navigation pad along the way. Look closely underneath the display
and you can see a touch-sensitive zoom control, which allows you to zoom in and out of web
pages with the minimum of effort.
On the back is a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, making it one of the best cameras on any Windows
Mobile device. OK, for some reason Windows phones tend to have lousy cameras, but at
least the Touch Diamond2 is keeping up with the competition.
Another key improvement is battery life. The old unit had a wimpy 900 mAh battery that
drained quite quickly. The new Touch Diamond2 has a much better 1100 mAh battery that can
power the handset for up to 5 hours talktime on 3G and an impressive 3 weeks standby time.
HTC have chosen to re-work their TouchFLO software, and it is now integrated deeper
into the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, giving the Touch Diamond2 a much more consistent
(if non-standard) interface. TouchFLO has been tweaked to make it more "touch friendly"
too, which is useful seeing as the navigation key has been consigned to history.
Other features are a GPS receiver, WiFi, a multimedia player that can cope with an alphabet
soup of formats (although notably, the Touch Diamond2 does not support DivX), the usual
collection of Windows Mobile software and an FM radio. Audio output is via the HTC ExtUSB
port rather than a standard audio jack.
The HTC Touch Diamond2 is a dual-band UMTS phone, supporting 900 and 2100 MHz HSDPA connections,
and it also supports quad-band GSM. It is quite possible that a North American variant
will follow with different frequencies. Internal RAM is a very useful 288 MB, and the processor
is a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200A.
This is a very impressive smartphone. The larger display and smarter looks also make
it a very distinctive looking device. The new version of HTC's TouchFLO software should
attract new and old customers alike. If you are currently using the older HTC Touch Diamond,
then this is almost definitely worth the upgrade.
We don't know how much the HTC Touch Diamond2 will cost, but it should be available during
early Q2 2009 in major European and Asian markets. No doubt it will also be sold to
carriers who will rebrand it (perhaps the T-Mobile MDA Compact V).