ITWire

Specs of the HTC Touch Diamond are definitely good, but by the same token, they could definitely have been even better still. To start with, there’s 4GB of storage – but no MicroSD card slot! 8GB Micro SD HC cards are AUD $80 – but with no MicroSD HC slot, 8GB MicroSD HC cards could be free but you can’t use them.

HTC says 4GB is enough to store your photos, music, videos etc – but let’s not forget how quickly Apple dumped its 4GB iPhone. So that’s a strike – let’s hope HTC releases either an HTC Touch Diamond 2 quickly or an interim model with MORE MEMORY and a MicroSD slot, dammit. How hard could this be?

So, there’s 4GB of internal storage, but there’s also 256MB of ROM and 192MB of DDR SDRAM, presumably to store and run the apps of the HTC Touch Diamond itself and to leave as much of the available 4GB as possible for the user.

The CPU is a Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 MHz, the OS is Windows Mobile 6.1, the weight is 110g, the dimensions are 102 mm (L) X 51 mm (W) X 11.35 mm (T), has an accelerometer built-in to automatically swivel the screen when the phone is rotated from vertical to horizontal position.

Which temporarily brings me to the Opera browser, before I go onto the rest of the specs. Using Opera Mobile 9.5, the HTC Touch Diamond has a very iPhone-esque Safari browsing experience – or so it seems in this YouTube video from PhoneMag.com.

You do get to see a lot of the Touch Diamond in action, and some glimpses of the Opera browser at work, with the same kind of finger sweeping motion to move up and down the page, double tapping to zoom in so text becomes larger and readable, and a zoom motion by moving your finger in a circular motion on the up/down/left/right button at the bottom of the screen to zoom in or out.

Turn the phone sideways, and the web page turns sideways as well, just like on the iPhone, showing the accelerometer in action.

There are instances where the phone doesn’t respond quickly in this video, but I don’t know if it’s because it’s a test phone or some other reason – when the phone launches in Australia I’ll definitely be asking HTC’s local PR company for a test model so I can try it out for myself.

Ok, back to the specs. The phone is 2G/3G/3.5G (although frequencies for 3.5G will vary by region), and the 3.5G side of the phone is HSDPA to 7.2Mbps-class. Sadly upload speeds are limited to 384Kbps, so the phone is NOT HSUPA compatible to 1.9Mbps, which is a shame.

Please read on to page 3 for more specs and thoughts. And... there are Cylons there! Well, sort of. You'll see what I mean. Read on!