PC Pro Slams the HTC Touch Diamond

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/2093...ch-diamond.html

"A frustrating phone in every way. Some excellent touches promise so much - including a great screen and web browser - but in use it's unbearably slow. When weighing your decision whether or not to buy the HTC Touch Diamond, we'd suggest you keep one dominant image in your mind: a set of old-fashioned scales. In the left, we'll put the Bad stuff. And in the right, we'll throw in all the Good. Very little about this product falls in between. Let's start off with the Bad."

What a great example of the media's double standards. They give the Diamond 2/6 stars and heavily criticize the battery life for not lasting through heavy use over a weekend. Their review of the iPhone 3G, a 5/6 star device, mentions that you'll need to charge the device every other day even with moderate use. So why is one product slammed and one product just barely criticized? It's like everyone is terrified to criticize the iPhone. Ridiculous.

However, on the speed of the Diamond, which is his primary complaint, I have to agree with him somewhat - even with the latest ROM update from a couple of weeks back, it's still too slow. Sometimes moving from element to element happens reasonably quickly, but there's still a delay where nothing happens at all. That might have been acceptable three years ago, but it's not acceptable today. Too often, it will stall out moving from one thing to the next. The funny thing is that even with that criticism, it's still the best Professional device I've used overall, at least one without a keyboard. On the stability front, even with no third party applications installed, I've had to soft reset it once after about a week of using it, which was a bit disappointing. Since then it's been two weeks without need for a reset, which is pretty good - although I'm spoiled by my T-Mobile Dash; I might have to reboot it once every three months at the worst.

On the looks front, the HTC Touch Diamond does very well. I took it to an AMD event in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and the "wow" factor it had when people looked at it was interesting - everyone loved it, until they started using it and guess what the first thing they said was? "Hmm - it's not very fast, is it?". That's an unfortunate reality about the state of the Touch Diamond right now - I'm really hoping that over the next few months, HTC's software engineers can optimize the Touch Diamond further and eliminate some of those delays.

Shockingly for any of you who know how I feel about most Apple products, I'm probably going to pick up an iPod Touch (likely a used one) so I can get more hands-on time with Apple's on-screen keyboard - I want to understand the subtleties of their approach vs. HTCs, because I can't seem to get any comfortable degree of accuracy with the Diamond's on-screen keyboard...I make error after error and I'm longing for a physical keyboard again.

Touch Diamond owners: how's your experience with the device so far? Do you agree with this review and rating of 2/6 stars?

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/2093...ch-diamond.html

"A frustrating phone in every way. Some excellent touches promise so much - including a great screen and web browser - but in use it's unbearably slow. When weighing your decision whether or not to buy the HTC Touch Diamond, we'd suggest you keep one dominant image in your mind: a set of old-fashioned scales. In the left, we'll put the Bad stuff. And in the right, we'll throw in all the Good. Very little about this product falls in between. Let's start off with the Bad."

What a great example of the media's double standards. They give the Diamond 2/6 stars and heavily criticize the battery life for not lasting through heavy use over a weekend. Their review of the iPhone 3G, a 5/6 star device, mentions that you'll need to charge the device every other day even with moderate use. So why is one product slammed and one product just barely criticized? It's like everyone is terrified to criticize the iPhone. Ridiculous.

However, on the speed of the Diamond, which is his primary complaint, I have to agree with him somewhat - even with the latest ROM update from a couple of weeks back, it's still too slow. Sometimes moving from element to element happens reasonably quickly, but there's still a delay where nothing happens at all. That might have been acceptable three years ago, but it's not acceptable today. Too often, it will stall out moving from one thing to the next. The funny thing is that even with that criticism, it's still the best Professional device I've used overall, at least one without a keyboard. On the stability front, even with no third party applications installed, I've had to soft reset it once after about a week of using it, which was a bit disappointing. Since then it's been two weeks without need for a reset, which is pretty good - although I'm spoiled by my T-Mobile Dash; I might have to reboot it once every three months at the worst.

On the looks front, the HTC Touch Diamond does very well. I took it to an AMD event in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and the "wow" factor it had when people looked at it was interesting - everyone loved it, until they started using it and guess what the first thing they said was? "Hmm - it's not very fast, is it?". That's an unfortunate reality about the state of the Touch Diamond right now - I'm really hoping that over the next few months, HTC's software engineers can optimize the Touch Diamond further and eliminate some of those delays.

Shockingly for any of you who know how I feel about most Apple products, I'm probably going to pick up an iPod Touch (likely a used one) so I can get more hands-on time with Apple's on-screen keyboard - I want to understand the subtleties of their approach vs. HTCs, because I can't seem to get any comfortable degree of accuracy with the Diamond's on-screen keyboard...I make error after error and I'm longing for a physical keyboard again.

Touch Diamond owners: how's your experience with the device so far? Do you agree with this review and rating of 2/6 stars?

[MattMojo]

It will take quite a bit for me to give up my Samsung I760. This device hardly never has to be rebooted and it is incredibly fast. Everything I do with it is snappy and never hangs on ANYTHING --- not to mention the battery life is crazy long!!

I must agree with the poster that is seems even though the reviews of the Iphone 3G includes more negatives than positives, they all end with "This is the greatest piece of technology in the world!!!" ... blah!! The Iphone is nice but by no means will it ever surpass the sheer configurabilty of WM. Not to mention nobody is pissed about how the latest and greatest somehow cost less than the original??? talk about the good ol' Apple tredmill.

WM has had it's rocky times, but WM6 has fixed all the issues I have ever had with it.



Mojo

[whydidnt]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Shockingly for any of you who know how I feel about most Apple products, I'm probably going to pick up an iPod Touch (likely a used one) so I can get more hands-on time with Apple's on-screen keyboard - I want to understand the subtleties of their approach vs. HTCs, because I can't seem to get any comfortable degree of accuracy with the Diamond's on-screen keyboard...I make error after error and I'm longing for a physical keyboard again.

I haven't tried a Touch Diamond, yet so I can't comment on it. However, I happily own a 32 GB iPod Touch. Apple has done a fantastic job with their error correction technology for the on-screen keyboard. I struggle sometimes with entering technical terms, abbreviations, and web addresses. Entering text for emails or notes works very well, however. Apple does a fantastic job "post-processing" your text and guessing what you meant to type and correcting it on the fly. I would think just by nature of the larger screen the keys are bigger and easier to hit as well. Perhaps the Diamond keyboard has added smart shortcuts, but previous WM devices didn't -- on the Apple iTouch, when I'm entering a web address, the keyboard magically presents me with a slash key and a .com key so I don't have to hit shift, etc. to type those common elements. It is certainly a better experience than I've had with WM on-screen keyboards.

[Ed@Brighthand]

I'm using the Diamond as my primary device right now, and I'm mostly satisfied with it. Obviously I wouldn't describe TouchFLO3D as being unacceptably slow, but it's a tad slower than I like. I'm hoping HTC will keep tweaking it to improve performance; there was a very noticeable jump in responsiveness with the ROM that was introduced a few weeks ago.

And one other thing to keep in mind: any slowness in the Diamond isn't inherent in the device, but in TouchFLO3D. A quick trip to Settings can turn that off and the regular Windows Mobile user interface comes through, and that operates as fast as you'd expect a 528 MHz model to do. You lose some of the coolness, but your work gets done faster.
.

[freddychew]

I have not own a Touch Diamond and I cant comment on this product. But with nightmare and the poor services of HTC staff. I would not dare to trust their future products anymore.

I do own a HTC TyTN II. Many reviews have claims the super set for this model. But it turn out to be a poor and big mistake in trusting them.

2 days after my purchase, It was not functioning properly. Send it back to the local agent and they replace it for me (Battery only). Thinking that will solve the problem. But it's is not the actual defect. It's the phone that is faulty.

Went back again to them and they give me 2 option 1. Leave the set with them for 2 to 3 weeks for replacement of the mother board or they to replace my set with a new one. But I must wait for delivery of the new set.

Waited for more than 2 months and they have forgotten about it. Try to get back to them and they make you a fool to tell you with a different story and ending with you having to bare with their faulty sets. In fact turn a deaf ear on you.

I will never trust this Brand again. Empty promises, very poor and bad after sales services, poor excuse and lack of trust confident to this brand.

Singapore

[bobbert]

Originally Posted by Ed@Brighthand

And one other thing to keep in mind: any slowness in the Diamond isn't inherent in the device, but in TouchFLO3D. A quick trip to Settings can turn that off and the regular Windows Mobile user interface comes through, and that operates as fast as you'd expect a 528 MHz model to do. You lose some of the coolness, but your work gets done faster.
.

That's the best news I've heard in a long time. Thanks for the great tip, Ed!

I want to buy a nicely spec'd PPC phone with VGA or better screen ASAP. But other than the Touch/TouchPro and SE XPERIA X1, there doesn't seem to be anything else coming. Even worse, if you want to go with Sprint, I suspect I probably won't be able to get the XPERIA either. I suppose the next batch of phones will be when WinMo 7 is ready?

So to follow-up, Ed or anyone else with hands-on knowledge... How confident are you that when TouchFLO3D is off that it still doesn't have performance problems? Is it possible that it only helps, but doesn't completely fix the peformance problems?

[Jason Dunn]

Oh yeah, and the other gem is that the one reviewer complains about the lack of an expansion slot on the Diamond, and the other doesn't mention that as a negative on the iPhone. Sure, the iPhone starts at 8 GB and the Diamond has only a 4 GB option, but why isn't it a negative that the iPhone doesn't have a memory card expansion slot? Or a removable battery?

[Fritzly]

I do not have a problem recharging my phone every night so I am not getting in this part of the debate but I have a Diamond and even with the latest ROM is very slow indeed. Also I do not think that you should disable Touch Flo to make it faster; HTC advertise the product with this feature and its impact on performances is something that they should have considered. I also use pocket Informant, a must IMO, and this further decrease performances.
Until HTC fixes issues I will not buy another phone frm them, period.

[whydidnt]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Oh yeah, and the other gem is that the one reviewer complains about the lack of an expansion slot on the Diamond, and the other doesn't mention that as a negative on the iPhone. Sure, the iPhone starts at 8 GB and the Diamond has only a 4 GB option, but why isn't it a negative that the iPhone doesn't have a memory card expansion slot? Or a removable battery?

I think you answered this question yourself. The iPhone natively comes with either twice or 4x as much memory as the Touch. Of course that makes the need for the memory slot less important.

I'm sorry for being negative, but the more we continue to allow MS and HTC to provide "less" than the competition, without calling them out on it, the longer we will get "less". Seriously, we are year removed from the orignal iPhone release, and still don't have a WM phone device that can match the hardware specifications of the iPhone - I'm talking fast processer, 3.5" hi-res screen, small form factor and loads of on-board memory. The upcoming Samsung comes closest, and may deliver on most of the this promise (sans screen resolution). The problem with MicroSD solutions is we still can't buy a card bigger than 8GB.

[bearxor]

While I've not used and don't plan on using the Touch Diamond or Touch Pro, everything mentioned in the article should come as no surprise to anyone who has a grasp of the history of HTC devices. They are consistently slow to do anything, always buggy even after several patches and just plain not very easy to use.

Here's the deal with the contrast in the HTC review and the iPhone reviews Jason.

The iPhone is not perfect. It's absolutely true. It has flaws, just as every phone does. Even through those flaws, however, the USER EXPERIENCE comes off very good. This is something Microsoft is still working on and, quite frankly, something HTC will NEVER get.

HTC lost my business starting with the Wizard/Apache and will never get it back. For all the great tinkering you can do with WM on HTC platforms, they have to provide a great out of the box experience.

HTC lost my business several years ago and it will take a miracle in their software development to win it back. It's not about the hardware anymore.