We check out the impressive unlocked version of the Touch Diamond 2. Is this fast new version worth the price of importing? Find out in our HTC Touch Diamond 2 review.
Review summary of the HTC Touch Diamond 2:
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 Thanks to its dazzling, responsive interface that almost completely hides Windows Mobile 6.1 from view (the worst parts of it, anyway), the HTC Touch Diamond 2 has sprung to the top of the pack as our favorite Windows Mobile touchscreen phone on the market. The phone isn't just superfast, it's also packed with intelligent new features, like the great calling features that aggregate useful information to make business conversations more informed. There is still room for improvement. Multimedia was a mess, a real shame on a phone with a hi-res screen like this one. Also, some apps we might expect from a U.S. carrier phone, like turn-by-turn navigation and a proper IM client, were missing on this unlocked, import version. Still, we had fun with the camera features, found Opera Mobile to be a capable, speedy browser, even over the slower network connection (here in the States, at least), and overall enjoyed our time with the HTC Touch Diamond 2. Release: April 2009. Price: $575.
Pros: Fast, responsive interface and hi-res touchscreen. Great calling features put useful info at fingertips. Solid camera and Web browsing features.
Cons: Multimedia functions were buggy, underpowered. Onscreen keyboard a bit small, though smart. Lacks some apps a U.S. carrier would include.
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73%
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Full HTC Touch Diamond 2 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The HTC Touch Diamond 2 isn't the prettiest looking phone. It lacks the unique faceted back plate that defined its predecessor (though Sprint dropped that plate for their version, anyway), and it's pretty much a bland, minimalist block. That is, until you turn it on. When the phone lights up, the 800 by 480 pixel screen comes to life with an interface so sharp and clean it feels more like a physical object than a bit of software. The 3.2-inch display isn't as bright as the screen on Apple's iPhone 3G, but the interface is even more polished and professional looking, taking great advantage of the Touch Diamond 2's deep contrast and dark blacks. Beneath the touchscreen, HTC has included a Zoom Bar, a clever addition to the TouchFLO 3D interface that won us over because it worked, zooming smoothly, every where we wanted it to work. In the photo viewer, in the camera, in Web sites and in Google Maps, we were always able to zoom in on the action by dragging our finger from left to right.
The TouchFLO 3D interface on the HTC Touch Diamond 2 hasn't changed much since we last saw it , but the Touch Diamond 2 is the most responsive TouchFLO phone we've seen (to check out recent HTC TouchFLO 3D phones, click here). In fact, we'd say that the HTC Touch Diamond 2 is the most responsive Windows Mobile phones we've seen, ever. When we dragged our finger across the icons at the bottom of the TouchFLO interface, they flew by quickly without lag or hesitation. Though the phone uses a resistive touchscreen, which is usually less finger-friendly than the capacitive technology found on phones like the Apple iPhone 3G, it seemed very sensitive and had no trouble registering even a light touch. It still worked a bit better when we broke out the stylus, but HTC has succeeded in making a mostly touchable interface for Windows Mobile that truly works like we want.
Beneath the surface, Windows Mobile still lurks, and the aging WinMo 6.1 interface shows up only occasionally, like in the settings menus or, even more unfortunately, in the Windows Media Player. But for 90% of the time, we never had to look at the Windows Mobile interface, as HTC's TouchFLO 3D dug deep to replace the ugliness beneath.
Calling – Very Good
We tested the HTC Touch Diamond 2 on AT&T's network in the greater Dallas metro area, and call quality could have been better, but this might be a function of the network we were using. In our experience, HSDPA-networked phones tend towards better quality than EDGE-networked phones, and our test unit could only surf EDGE in the U.S. The phone had a somewhat hollow and distant sound on both ends of a phone call. It wasn't bad, just sounded a little digitized.
That said, no business phone on the market does a better job with call management. While in a phone call, the HTC Touch Diamond 2 aggregates information about the person to whom you're speaking. When you call a contact, the phone gathers up call logs for that contact, as well as messages and address book info. Need to recall a specific detail from the last e-mail your client sent you? Once you've made the call, you just press the e-mail button and every e-mail they've sent appears. It's a very useful and intuitive feature, and we think it could set a standard for business phones in the future.
Other calling features on the phone were just as easy to use. Conference calling was a snap, and not only could we easily join and separate a 4-way conversation, we could also pull up specific messages and information from any one of the callers in the party, thanks to the HTC Touch Diamond 2's intuitive searching. The phone lacks voice dialing, which is a serious omission for a touchscreen phone, as voice dialing makes placing calls easier while we're driving. Still, it packs a nice speakerphone, and the Diamond 2 had no trouble pairing with our Bluetooth headsets.
Messaging – Good
For messaging, the HTC Touch Diamond 2 does a fine job, but there are no real surprises here, and the unlocked version of the phone admittedly lacks some of the carrier software that makes messaging a better experience. For text messaging, the basic SMS app is the standard Windows Mobile fare, but the phone does a nice job displaying new messages on the TouchFLO 3D home screen, with some slick animation when you move to the next new message in the pile. The phone also has a nice looking threaded messaging feature, which displays all the incoming and outgoing messages in a conversation, much like an IM app.
Speaking of instant messaging, that's one feature missing on the HTC Touch Diamond 2, and this is an app that the U.S. carriers usually bundle with their subsidized devices. Of course, since this is Windows Mobile, there are plenty of third-party apps to buy and download for an IM fix, but we wish HTC had bundled a nice app instead. Perhaps something with Gtalk and some social networking chat built in. Otherwise, expect to find the standard Outlook client, which is not bad, since Outlook can handle HTML-formatted e-mails.
The HTC Touch Diamond 2 uses a very nice onscreen keyboard. It's small, because even at 3.2-inches, the display on the Touch Diamond 2 isn't very wide. Even in landscape mode, the keyboard seems compacted onto the screen. Still, the keyboard was very intelligent. The phone uses XT9 software to correct misspelled words, and this usually did a nice job, if our fingers didn't muck things up. Once, the phone decided to go with "thwarted" when we really meant to type "the," but usually things turned out okay. If you finish a message and still see typos, the HTC Touch Diamond 2 has a built-in spell check to check a finished document. Our favorite feature is the ability to hold down a key to access the number or symbol above it. HTC has used this on their hardware keyboard phones, like the T-Mobile Dash, so we're happy to see it on a software keyboard as well.
Multimedia – Mediocre
The multimedia experience on our HTC Touch Diamond 2 review unit would have been much better if the apps worked properly. The Touch Diamond 2 doesn't pack any internal memory worth speaking of, so we loaded our 8GB microSDHC card and tried synchronizing music through Windows Media Player. When we tried to playback our songs, the music player crashed. In fact, this usually caused so many errors on the phone that we had to restart the device. We tried a few different cards and sync methods, but they all eventually resulted in a crash.
When things did work, usually through a single song, the player looked promising. At least on the music side, we never had to dig through Windows Media player, with its silly library switching and failure to find our tunes. The HTC interface is much better, and we could see our album artwork and control playback nicely from the TouchFLO 3D menu. Still, because of the crashes, we never got this to work properly.
For video we were even more disappointed. Though the HTC Touch Diamond 2 sports a best-in-class 800 by 480 pixel display, videos cropped to this resolution would not play. VGA videos would playback, but quality was lacking. Videos cut and sized for the iPhone's 480 by 320 pixel screen played back nicely, but this seemed to forfeit the benefits of a superior screen resolution.
Finally, even if HTC were to fix all of these buggy issues with multimedia playback, we'd still have a hard time choosing this device as a converged phone / media player over our current favorite, the iPhone. The HTC Touch Diamond 2 lacks a 3.5mm headphone port. You have to use an adapter or USB-ready headphones, both of which are far less convenient than simply plugging in our own earbuds. We'd also wish for some internal storage; 8GB would be a nice start. Finally, as long as HTC is improving Windows Media Player on the phone itself, why not touch up the WMP interface on our desktop? The iPhone / iTunes combo is still a knockout punch compared to the aging, counterintuitive Windows Media Player.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
For years we've been asking smartphone makers to improve their calendars, and HTC has finally made some slick, useful improvements to the basic scheduling app on Windows Mobile. The full calendar sits on top with the TouchFLO 3D interface, and it looks great. There are even cool transitions when you zoom in and out of a day's events. Otherwise, in terms of capabilities, WinMo didn't need any more help, and the calendar app is completely capable of handling all our scheduling needs.
The HTC Touch Diamond 2 also comes with the full Office Mobile suite, including a remote desktop client. You can create and edit Office documents on the go, though serious typists will want to avoid the diminutive onscreen keyboard for Word processing. Otherwise, there weren't a lot of extras for productivity apps. We did appreciate the amazingly simple Internet Sharing app, which let us tether the phone to our laptop for connecting to the Net. On the Touch Diamond 2, you can enable tethering from a pop-up menu when you connect a USB cable, which couldn't be simpler. Unfortunately, our test unit was not equipped with U.S. 3G bands, and browsing over a shared EDGE connection was prohibitively slow.
Web browsing – Very Good
The HTC Touch Diamond 2 ships with Opera Mobile for Web browsing, and this is a great choice, much better than the standard Internet Explorer. Even over a slower EDGE connection, Web browsing was fast and most flawless. The zoom bar just below the screen was very useful and provided smooth zooming to read text up close. We wish that Opera Mobile let us open more than 3 tabs at once, but this didn't cause much trouble. We were happy enough with fast page rendering and near-perfect layout on all the pages we tried, especially our own homepage. Though built-in Flash isn't an option on this version of Opera Mobile, the Touch Diamond 2 does come with a dedicated YouTube viewer, so at least we could get some of our streaming video needs satisfied.
GPS - Good
Google Maps on the HTC Touch Diamond 2 looks great, and again the zoom bar came to the rescue to make the app much easier to use. We wish the phone came with some sort of turn-by-turn directions, but Google Maps only provides clickable directions with a follow-me dot to show your GPS location. With such a beautiful, hi-res screen, portable navigation software is a natural fit. This is an application we're sure to see when a major U.S. carrier picks up the device, so navigation users might want to wait to buy this device. We were also disappointed that the HTC Touch Diamond 2, with its advanced, 5-megapixel camera, lacked a geotagging option for pictures.
Camera - Good
The 5-megapixel shooter on the HTC Touch Diamond 2 has some interesting options, and it took some pretty good pictures. We were quite impressed by the pics, and some of the shots we took under the best conditions were even good enough to print. For desktop wallpaper images and Facebook shots, the camera is definitely up to the task. Light handling could be a problem. On a sunny day, flora and fauna would overexpose, leaving a harsh glare on the image. Colors were still very good, and images were sharp enough to see fine details. In fact, the Touch Diamond 2 uses an optional touch focus system, so you can tap an area on the screen and the camera will focus there. It's a nifty feature, as long as your subject isn't moving. We had less success with the panorama mode. Though the image looked good, stitched borders between the measly 3-shots that made up the panorama we usually obvious and blurry.
Though the zoom bar also works in the camera, we'd stay away, since digital zoom does nothing to improve an image. Self portrait shots on the Touch Diamond 2 were also difficult. There is no hardware camera button, an unfortunate omission. We had to line up our finger with the button on screen before we stretched our arm to take our own picture. Often, if we moved our finger, the picture wouldn't take. Check out our image samples below for our favorite pics from our testing sessions.
Puffball flower
Field of Wildflowers at Dawn
Self Portrait
Rusty Lock
Panorama shot with Sunset White Balance
Water Tower – Full Zoom, Sunset
Water Tower – No Zoom, Sunset
Finally, the Touch Diamond 2 is capable of recording VGA-resolution video. Quality wasn't very good, not much better than a normal cameraphone, but the resolution meant videos looked better shown full screen. We still saw some waviness and pixelation in our videos, but more detail than we'd see on cameras with smaller video sizes.
Price and availability
The HTC Touch Diamond 2 can be found in its current configuration, without 3G networking support, online for around $575, unlocked.
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