Digital Trends

HTC Touch Diamond December 2nd, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Features & Design

Though the HTC Touch Diamond looks fairly modest and conservative on the face, its namesake diamond design jumps out on the back, where a cut-gemstone pattern embossed in the plastic gives it quite a unique look. Chamfered edges and a satin metal triangle around the camera lens play into the effect, making the phone look far more textured and three dimensional than it really is (it lies flat on its back despite the mountainous-looking embossing). The screen and lower button panel have both been given a mirror-like sheen, lending one final bit of stylistic backing to the Diamond name. Overall, we found it to be an attractive and exceptionally pocketable phone. At only .44 inches deep, and weighing 110 grams, it felt right at home in any pair of Levi’s. 

Like the other phones in HTC’s Touch line, almost all interaction occurs through its 2.8-inch touch screen or the handful of buttons scattered around the rest of the outside shell. These include a home and back button on the face, along with start/end call buttons, and a discrete directional pad in the center. We liked how the lack of “edge” buttons on this pad contributed to a clutter-free look, but functionally it also makes the pad much more difficult to use. On its edges, the Diamond has a power button up top, volume rockers on the side, and a stylus squirreled away in the lower-right bottom.

Other features include a fairly generous 4GB of internal storage (but with no room for expansion), a 3.2-megapixel camera, a built-in FM radio, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and media player. 

Accessories

Besides the phone itself, HTC’s retail Touch Diamond package includes a fairly standard bundle of accessories. This includes an HTC ExtUSB cable for charging and connecting to a PC, a pair of headphones with the same jack, and a wall charger that terminates in a female USB jack for use with the cable.

Display

The display on the Diamond is among the finest we’ve ever seen on a mobile handset. HTC has managed to squeeze a full 640 x 480 VGA display into a space just 2.8 inches across, giving it an extremely fine dot pitch (a measure of how close together the pixels are spaced) that makes text and images extraordinarily smooth looking – as if printed on the page of a magazine. Add in a powerful backlight, vibrant colors, and you’re looking at one of the best screens in the business, though it is somewhat prone to fingerprints like all large touch screens.

Image Courtesy of HTC