HTC Touch Diamond

Pants - avoid this handset like the plague. I purchased my htc Touch Diamond with an 18 month contract and I'm counting the days until I can get out of it.

The touch screen is heavy and cumbersome

It freezes

Frequently the sound (all sound) cuts off and demands a reboot to resolve it.

The reception is poor - my partner has a handset on the same network and often has adequate signal when my htc has none.

The gyroscopic orientation is flakey.

Many of the apps I've downloaded do really work that well.

I have had previous Windows Mobile handsets before but nothing as tetchy as this one.

Very compact and has a good processor. Easy to use and is very lightweight. The only thing that disappoints me is the battery life but the battery itself is small because of the size of the phone.

Good gadget, very good phone, compact and filled with feature and not that difficult to operate. The biggest problem I have with the HTC Touch Diamond the battery life, i am a big user of phone and had to charge mine 3 times a day.ie was on charging almost after every call. This was when i was not using anyother feature. I also found the sensitivity of the screen is a bit towards lower side and I couldn't find an option to change it.

HTC Diamondphone looks nice.

However, this is the worst phone I have ever had. It freezes up. The battery only lasts a day. It rings people without you knowing. The camera is slow. The screen keeps going off when you a calling answer phone and have to press numbers.

I will never have another HTC phone. I'm going back to Sony or a Nokia.

Seriously, I had the chance of the Compact 4 or an iPhone and I made a terrible decision. The Compact 4 is by far the worse phone I have ever owned. It's battery life is pathetic and as for Windows Mobile, it just does not work on such a small screen. My brother has an iPhone and it's in a different league. There isn't really anything good about this phone. As a phone it's almost unuseable, the camara has such a long delay on taking the photo after pressing the button that only still life pictures are possible. I would stamp on it if I could get away with it. It's soooooooooooooooooo bad!

This is a truly shocking phone to use when you consider the competition. I got one thru work and I stuck the sim card in my old SE K850i after a week of using this dreadful piece of equipment. I had simply had enough.I can only answer around 10% of my calls first time, I usually have to phone back as it does not respon when you press the answer button. The phone simply does what it wants a lot of the time.Our company has the phones under review already after only 8 weeks after a torrent of complaints from employees and I think replacements are in the pipeline. Unfortunately we use a piece of software which is installed on the HTC.If you are wanting an advanced piece of kit as a phone then this is certainly cutting edge but is so user unfriendly that you'll want to return it after a few days.Go for a Nokia or a Blackberry instead.

The HTC Touch Diamond suffers from a steeper depreciation of appreciation than most phones I've owned. I loved it for the first couple of weeks. Then slowly, reality set in. This phone usually needs to be rebooted once a day. This appears to be due to the utterly inefficient and buggy WM6.1, which loses memory space faster than an ageing senile pensioner. And perhaps because TouchFLO 3D sits prettily on top of this stinking heap of "because I say so" OS design, it soon starts slipping off and not looking so pretty. Or is it that it is partly built using an arguably amateurish technology called LUA? You see, this HTC hardware just doesn't have the muscle to shift the humongous clumsy beast that is WM6.1 and TouchFLO 3D ensembled. This is the case when you swipe the screen... and... wait... for... the... next page to load. Except it takes longer even than the effort it just took you to read that sentence.

Another example is when you hang up on a call. You hang up the call. You hang... You hang up... You HANG UP THE CALL!! Wow! How hard can it be to hang up a call?! And I won't even begin to tell you how long you have to wait until the camera starts up so you can take a photo. Suffice it to say that by the time you're ready to take the photo, not only have all smiles crystallised on your friends' faces, but they've probably already packed their bags for their next holiday. Oh and you'll realise that you don't even have a photo-assist light to try to make a photo of some vague silhouettes of people who may look a little like your friends. A flash you say? What luxury that would be!

Textual input is also not always a delight. If you have your phone using the built-in on-screen Phone Keypad, you may be able to get away with typing relatively fast. If the system hasn't slowed to a crawl, that is, and starts swallowing letters and spaces like a hungry beastie. You can forget any other mode of input, however, if you want to finish that text message some time today. Oh and for precise positioning of the cursor, say to insert a word in the middle of your text, forget using your finger. Bring out the stylus and save yourself countless attempts.

Nonetheless, there are loads of nifty features in there to save your day, such as Google Maps working very well with GPS (internet connection required via your mobile network provider), email on the go (er... internet connection required for this to work as a truly email-anywhere concept), a top-tier web browser (did I mention the internet connection requirement?)... Although, pausing there for a moment, Opera, the included web browser, is also a slight disappointment in the long term usage, as it is a tad idiosyncratic and even buggy. But it is soon forgiven when I cast an eye at WM6.1's built-in Pocket Internet Explorer - now that IS a horror!

I SO want to like this phone. I DO! It's just that, well, the battery life, I mean, to not even last through a day of normal usage?! It doesn't! And having to reboot the phone more regularly than a PC because TouchFLO 3D slows down to a sleepy snail's pace is not my idea of fun.

On the plus side, you'll love the 30 seconds of awe you'll get from your friends when you show them the front home screen, swipe through to the message page, and show them the swish effect of moving to the next message, then on to the weather page, and finally when you let them play with Teeter (which I played perhaps 3 times in the 4 months I've had the phone, although admittedly for almost an hour at a time).

And then you'll probably start dreaming of what the next iPhone will be like, or perhaps how Microsoft should be spanked hard until it really hurts and they start to produce a version of Windows Mobile that is actually more like what Vista is to Mac OS X. And you'll forget the Diamond, much like you moved on from that brief encounter with that ultra-sexy redhead so long ago. Until you have to reboot or your battery dies, that is.

When I saw the phone and read about the features (WiFi, GPS ready, 3.5G,...) I thought that is my phone.The drama started unpacking it and getting started. I don't know why most companies nowadays don't give their customers a printed user menu anymore, especially considering the high price tag for this unit. The printed short guide is surely not good enough and within minutes you see yourself starting up the computer to read through the pdf user guide. And that is not well written, so you start printing the guide out.Having the phone now for about two months I decided to buy a new phone. This HTC diamond just annoys me and if the fine for throwing items out of the window weren't that high it would have gone that way...1. Battery Life: it is short, can't say exactly how short, but it might happen that you are calling someone with a half full battery indication and few minutes later the phone shuts itself down without a warning.2. The software: might it be because I am Apple user or that I never used a smartphone before. The touchflow looks nice in the advertisement, but in real life it is slow. But be also aware that once you scrolled too far you might have difficulties to scroll back up again. So you might have to start all over again3. The software crashes quiet often. I have to end about 5% of all calls by removing the battery4. If the phone gets the idea of using WiFi even you don't want to... You keep on deselecting it for several times. If you still can't convince the phone to leave WiFi off... remove the battery5. The touchscreen: I never had a phone with touch screen and will never buy one again. When on the phone with someone I often deactivate the microphone or hang up the call. Not pleasant. Or you have the phone in your pocket, you miss the call due to the noise on the street, but the incoming call deactivated the sleeping mode. Now your phone calls whoever the jeans touches in your phone memory phone book. Might be embarrassing, and it happened very often to me6. the screensaver: Ever tried to make a call to a company and dial through a menu? Use another phone, the HTC touch diamond screensaver has to be deactivated avery few seconds and at the end you might get kicked out of the menuOk, i would like to know whether these are general problems with smartphones (as said, this is my first one) or whether I am too picky.

I love this handset the HTC Touch Diamond. Orange have it as it is supposed to be if you get it from them but O2 have a variant which is slightly different called the XDA Ignito. Tmobile also has a variant called the MDA Compact 4 which has a flat back like the o2 version. The "Touch Flo" system works well and is great for 1st time Windows mobile users as it looks less intimidating at 1st glance. If you are interested, pop along to Youtube and search for the variant you want to take a look at. The Touch Diamond will impress most people with looks and functionality. (HTC - Where is my big cheque lol)

I had a tytn 2 by htc and then an iPhone which i thought was awesome but i really missed the windows platform, for me i think the htc diamond is a fantastic combination of the two a copy of , apple graphics but improved and windows platform a truly brilliant phone, but could do with a louder ringer. swifty