Notice something? Lot’s and lot’s of fingerprints. Yes the Touch Diamond has an extremely glossy surface, which when you “touch” can leave some serious marks. You have no idea how many puns you can do with this devices’ model name.

Continue reading as I provide details on what I saw, what I was told and what I think of the HTC Touch Diamond launched by Leaf in South Africa.

I can’t say that the design reminds me of the iPhone or if it’s a copy. I’m mentioning the iPhone as device such as the Samung Instinct are named as iPhone copies. I’m just stating that Touch Diamond is definitely not even close to an iPhone look alike.

But it is glamorous. A sleek and slim candybar in black with only four visible keys gives off a scent of sophistication, which is expresses even more deeply by the press image below:

Wait, I did say four visible keys didn’t I? At naked eye situation and when you haven’t seen the phone before you don’t expect much more. In fact, I got confused by the circle in the middle: was it a navi-wheel or a d-pad? When Kevin Chen, General Manager of HTC for MEA and CIS, gave me an introduction on the phone, I found out that it was actually the two of them. You have a navi-wheel and a d-pad but you can barely see them. It’s difficult to notice what is what, but if you look at close-up images, it’s relatively simple to notice the arrows and the circumference light.

The most useful function of the navi-wheel for me is on the web browser. I’ve never even dreamed of this type of function with a navi-wheel, but I was already expecting a high-level web browser in the phone, from Sheylara’s review at the Singapore launch. The use of the navi-wheel is simply to zoom in and zoom out. This sounds unnecessary, but in fact, it’s crucial for browsing. In latest smartphones and in Opera Mini itself, the browser is its full resolution, and not cropped or formatted to fit the window, you get scroll bars. The work is reduced with the navi-wheel as you can smoothly go inside of a page, and quickly outside. You won’t even feel that its a mobile phone browser!

As I was talking about the browser, I asked if there was FlashLite3 support, for websites such as YouTube. Chen told me that they had struck a deal with Google, and they had their own YouTube application. I took a quick look at it, and it seemed really “polished”.

If there is an advanced multi-touch-ish display why would you need a d-pad or a navi-wheel? HTC put its effort on one-hand navigation, again that’s according to Chen, as they wanted to contrast against Apple iPhone’s two-handed navigation. To tell you the truth, Chen used the word finger instead of hand, but in this context that concept doesn’t really fit well, so I have to use to the word hands for you to differentiate in User Interface usage. I haven’t had the chance to test the iPhone, but the few minutes I spent with the Touch Diamond convinced me that one-hand can be enough for full-usage of the device.

The D-pad had reduced use when I was playing around with the Touch Diamond, but when one of the representatives requested me to add my contact there, I struggled without the D-pad. These old arrow keys continue to be very necessary for the simplest tasks, and I’m sure that I could find more uses as I went with the device. I’m expecting to have the phone in my hands again soon, but this time, for a full-on review.

One of the highlights in this phone is the User Interface. Windows Mobile 6.1, and the advanced hardware components (listed on the press release,) enable the Touch Diamond to present smooth transitions and animations, but the transitions aren’t as slick as the N78’s.

The whole usability relies mostly on the touchscreen. The display has a VGA resolution, that’s a massive 640×480 pixels on a 2.8″ display, which is literally the double of pixels on a Nokia N95 8GB, which has the same screen size.

More pixels means more room for buttons, and if you look at the buttons on the top bar, they are quiet small, and even smaller they look on the actual device. However, they are easy to press. I don’t know how this works, but even though my thumbprint covers a lot of space, not once I touched the wrong button. This is very different from all other touchscreens I’ve had the chance to use. Another feature of the touchscreen is the haptic feedback, which is a touch you will feel when you touch the touchscreen, (sorry, there was no other appropriate word) the problem is that I felt absolutely nothing there. I know that the models at the launch were prototypes, but I doubt the hardware was going to be changed, so in my quick opinion, the whole new touchscreen technology is rather unnoticeable.

Before I move to anything else, there is a sensor on the stylus slot. This means that everytime you remove the stylus, the phone knows it. This is very helpful as it’s a new feature which might provide innovation and it’s something developers will like to interact with, if they are given the API. There is one simple use that I know of: if you’re in a call, and remove the stylus, the notes applications is automatically launched for you to take notes on the device. Clever, heh? I presume many more functions are possible, you can even compare it to the hype that there was with the release of the accelerometer API by Nokia for S60 phones. Of course, there might not be as much use, but the popularity and use should be in a healthy proportion to the accelerometer use.

There are no music controls, and we know that HTCs aren’t really focused on music. The TouchFLO 3D technology empowered music controls for an interactive browsing and control. I only had a quick look at the music player, and I missed the stop button, although I found all others. I presume there will be visualizations and equalizer setting.

Both the contact list, phonebook, or as seen above, “People” as well as the Image library or Gallery have an interesting browsing technique: you just flick the picture. It’s simple dragging the picture down, and it will produce an animation which mimics the change of a notebook page. At the left there is sort of a scroll bar where you can browse the thumbnail views of the gallery. Again, very smooth User Interface in my opinion.

Unfortunately I didn’t even get to test the camera on the Touch Diamond, but there were old HTC prototypes at the launch, such as the TYTN II and the Touch. I noticed that the camera is quite slow, it doesn’t refresh the viewfinder properly, but the capture quality was not tested. The Touch Diamond’s camera is a 3.2 megapixel with autofocus, but no flash or optical zoom.

I was wondering if those geometric designs at the back were just lines or were actually geometric shapes at different levels. It turns out that the back feels like a true diamond as those triangles are actually shaped. An interesting design contrast, where the front part is totally smooth and the back is shaped.

The back part of the device. The 900mAH battery is quite small and thin.

The above unfocused pictures are the lateral views of the HTC Touch Diamond. You can see the bottom part, which has a microUSB port, the left side which has two rubber keys and its press image, the top part which has the ‘on/off’ button, which is quite hard to press, and finally the right side of the device.