HTC Touch Diamond has Windows glass jaw

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 07 May 2008 18:23

Opinion and Analysis

A lot of media reports are circulating which extol the virtues of the latest hot product from High Tech Computer, the HTC Touch Diamond 3G smartphone, and like so many other products, comparing it to the Apple iPhone. Sorry HTC, but the addition of an accelerometer and a larger high resolution 640 x 480 screen still won't put the new Touch model within shouting distance of the iPhone.

Let's put aside the one major weakness of the iPhone - it's not 3G. We know a 3G (maybe even a 3.5G?) iPhone will be with us soon. I have been using an HTC Touch Dual for some months and playing with a colleague's unlocked iPhone for a similar length of time. There is a vast gulf between the two products and it starts with the operating system.

Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, the resident OS on the HTC Touch Diamond, is no Mac OS X and it doesn't come close to the implementation of Mac OS X on the iPhone. Compared to the iPhone's simple, intuitive, easy to navigate icon driven user interface, the HTC Touch screen looks like a dog's breakfast - icons galore, most of them incomprehensible and no sense of where home is. Yes there is a little house you can touch that takes you to the start screen but where you go from there or what your options are is anything but clear to a new user.

Now for a word or two about the touch screens of the HTC and Apple products. Once again there is no comparison.

The responsiveness and sensitivity of the iPhone touch screen is streets ahead of my HTC Touch. The multi-touch pinch capability of the iPhone and the accelerometer which automatically changes the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape, together with the 3.5 inch screen and a respectable version of Safari, makes web browsing about as good as it can get on such a small device. Apparently the HTC Touch Diamond will be a significant improvement on what I have, with the 2.8 inch screen equipped with its own accelerometer for automatic screen orientation changes and the ability to pan and zoom on web pages displayed on the opera browser. How the panning and zooming is achieved is not exactly clear.

Another area where the HTC Touch Diamond falls short is storage - just 4GB compared to the iPhone, which now starts at 8GB and also offers a 16GB version. CONTINUED