I got a new mobile phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.
The good
- It comes in a nice black diamond shaped box. So shiny!
- The handset is very slim and light. Its case is great.
- The Teeter game using the accelerometer is so much fun!
- The camera images look really good, and it has auto-focus.
- Google maps with GPS… Wow! I could use up my 500Mb allowance in no time playing with this.
- Using Wifi & GPRS to browse websites is awesome, and it’s really easy to save pages for offline viewing.
- Hidden magnetic stylus that I didn’t even realise was there.
- It’s small and light enough
The bad
- The “TouchFLO 3D” menu is very slightly more jerky than I’d want it to be.
- The speakers are very tinny and too quiet, even on loudest volume setting is pretty quiet.
- View emails and texts through the TouchFLO menu takes too many steps (there may be a shortcut I’m not aware of, but I have not been provided with a user manual, even after asking Orange for one).
- Shell32.exe crashed already. Within one day of using it! Didn’t actually have any bad effect though.
- HTCAlbum.exe also crashed. Again, no noticable effect.
- mbutton.exe crashed too. Okay that’s 3rd party, but it never, ever crashed on my SPV M3100.
- manila.exe crashed. [update: I complained to Orange about this and was told “Windows isn’t even stable on the desktop. We can’t investigate isolated crashes”.
- The on-screen keyboard irritatingly pops up and obscures forms and emails so you can’t read what you’re typing. The M3100 also had this problem, but then its on-screen keyboard was a lot smaller.
- I’m really feeling the lack of a hardware keyboard. It takes a lot more concentration to type.
- When on a phonecall, the screen switches itself off after 5 seconds of inactivity. I suppose this is a feature, but I wish I knew how to disable it.
August 13, 2008 at 11:49 am |
The user guide for the HTC Touch Diamond is in the lid of the box. It is not printed, it is in PDF form on a disk. I got mine from Orange and this is how it arrived. I also have problems with the jerkiness of TouchFlo but after a few hard resets it seems to be a bit better. Make sure you back up everything if you do a hard reset (I use Sprite Backup – free for 30days but I have the full version so I don’t know if you lose any functionality on the trial). Speaker seems OK for loudness on mine but yes it is tinny. I like the TouchFlo emails and texts, just slide to the text screen and there is your text, you can also click all messages if you want the standard windows view.
Shell32.exe crashed on mine yesterday but no strange effects. I have to restart my device every day just to clear the memory that TouchFlo is hogging after looking through pics etc. No other crashes except today when I hung up a call from Orange my whole screen turned to black and white dots (like the snow effect of bad reception on a TV screen) – restarted and it’s OK.
There are a few different on screen keyboards you can try – all the HTC ones seem to take up too much of the screen – I’m happy using stylus for text entry so I use the standard Windows Keyboard which is much smaller.
The phone screen switching off can be fixed with registry tweaks. I think it uses a light sensor to do this aswell so you don’t press on screen buttons with your cheek. http://www.xda-developers.com/ – go to forums – HTC Diamond for all the tweaks available. I’m resisting using any of these until Orange have replied to my Tech Support request. I did use a number of them and they did not cause any more problems than I currently have. I am also considering upgrading the ROM from the standard Orange one but this will invalidate any warranty.
September 17, 2008 at 3:59 pm |
It’s probably too early since you just got this phone, but I’ll recommend you switch to Blackberry anyway. It’s like Windows Mobile, except everything just works. I was rolling with the Windows band wagon since 2002 (I got the first ever Windows mobile). I reluctantly left it for the new and exciting world of BB this summer. And I tell you, it’s all the good bits of Windows Mobile, but none of the bad. I’ve never, ever had a system crash. Never had an app freeze, never had to go to into the registry to change some silly value like how often your alarm rings, never had to resort to hacks just to get a ringtone to play from my mobile, and of course, never had to pull for emails every 5 minutes to “fake” push email technology.
I will never go back to Windows Mobile. I hope you’ll also share this experience.
October 14, 2008 at 7:13 pm |
Thanks Original Sin! I now have a Blackberry Pearl and it’s a million times better. It is much, much more stable and never crashes. The email system is lovely.
There are some strange limitations though. There is no ’sent box’ and I can’t save attachments in a file explorer type program. See my review
October 14, 2008 at 7:22 pm |
Wow Kevlarski, restarting every day sounds like a return to the bad old days of Windows 98. Come over to the Blackberry side and join us…