HTC Touch Diamond (Sprint)

Recently, I reviewed the HTC Touch Diamond, an overachieving smartphone with plenty of killer features. It packed a full-blown VGA LCD, a beautiful TouchFLO user interface shell, GPS, and Wi-Fi into a small, sleek form factor. Unfortunately, poor battery life, plenty of bugs, and the inability to hook into U.S.-based 3G networks sank the handset, particularly when you consider its high $729 list price. Sprint has now released a CDMA version of the Touch Diamond that addresses several of the unlocked version's flaws. The carrier is selling it for just $249 (after two-year contract and online and mail-in rebates). That's much more palatable than the unlocked model's price tag, even if several key problems remain.

The Sprint Touch Diamond retains its black, glossy plastic front panel, but the jewel-like asymmetric angles and cuts of the original plastic battery cover have been replaced. Sprint fashioned the back of its Touch Diamond with a smooth, rubber grip in a burgundy color. The device measures 4.0 by 2.0 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.1 ounces. The top of the handset features a power button, while the left side includes hardware volume buttons and a silly "HTC Innovation" logo. The right side is clean, while the bottom features a mini USB jack that fits the Touch Diamond's included wired earbuds, USB cable, and AC power adapter.

There's no hardware keyboard, and that's part of the reason why the handset is significantly thinner than other smartphones, like the Sprint BlackBerry 8830 or Motorola Q9c. Instead, a virtual QWERTY keyboard pops up on the screen. It's similar to the one you find on an iPhone, but tighter given the Touch Diamond's smaller 2.8-inch, 480-by-640-pixel LCD (versus the iPhone's 3.5-inch, 320-by-480 LCD). I found the keyboard cramped and difficult to type on. Underneath the touch screen, there's a backlit, circular control pad that serves as a touchable zoom/scroll wheel in certain spots such as on Web pages. Four hardware keys—Home, Back, Call, and End—flank the control pad on both sides.

The TouchFLO interface is both an asset and a liability on this phone. It's beautiful, with crisp, colorful graphics, and a scrollable application bar across the bottom of the screen. I found I could perform many regular tasks, such as flipping through photos, dialing numbers, and adding contacts, by using my fingers instead of the stylus, provided I moved slowly and deliberately. On the other hand, this is no iPhone, and around every corner lurks a Windows Mobile dialog box with tiny buttons and too many choices. The TouchFLO interface does a better job than most Windows Mobile shells, but anyone coming from an iPhone will likely experience frustration, especially when the on-screen keyboard covers an important chunk of a Web page. In addition, the less expensive Samsung Instinct, which has a lower screen resolution and isn't as pretty, responded more accurately to my finger touches.

Call quality on the Touch Diamond was okay, but not as good as I'd like, though reception was solid even in rural areas. Voices sounded a tad raspy in both directions, and there was a trace of hiss in the earpiece. The harsh-sounding speakerphone wasn't quite loud enough for outdoor use.

Oddly, the Sprint Touch Diamond gets quite hot during calls. It wasn't enough to burn my face or ear, but the device gets considerably warmer than the iPhone. The handset paired with a Cardo S-800 Bluetooth headset without incident.

The Touch Diamond works on Sprint's high-speed EV-DO Rev A network, offering browsing speeds in the 700-to-1,400-Kbps range if you're in a covered area. It can serve as a modem for your laptop if you sign up for Sprint's modem tethering plan, and there's also a built-in Wi-Fi radio. Suffice it to say that getting your broadband fix with the Touch Diamond isn't a problem. As a bonus, Sprint includes a full copy of Opera Mobile 9.5, which showed solid renderings of WAP pages and—finally—supports Flash content on desktop sites.

Underneath the TouchFLO hood is a full copy of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, which brings Microsoft Office document editing along with Outlook and Exchange synchronization with Direct Push e-mail. Hardware-wise, the Touch Diamond sports a 528-MHz CPU and 203MB of RAM, with a roomy 127MB available for user programs. HTC bundles a copy of the vendor's nifty Task Manager for closing errant Windows Mobile threads. Overall, the Touch Diamond felt more responsive than the unlocked model. But this high-resolution handset could still use some more oomph in the CPU department to overcome frequent, 3-second freeze-ups. I also saw several service.exe error dialog boxes (using only the built-in apps) during the review period. Perhaps most disappointing element was the Touch Diamond's battery life: It lasted just 2 hours and 54 minutes on a talk-time rundown test, which is one of the lowest figures I've ever recorded.

Sprint's custom YouTube app served up sharp but choppy video after long delays. Sprint TV offers plenty of channels, which the carrier sells in several packages that cost from $15 to $25 per month. But when I first fired it up, I saw a "Sprint TV Conflict" error dialog box because I hadn't used the Task Manager to quit YouTube but had just tapped the Close button instead. Once I cued up CNN Mobile Live, it expanded to fit the screen in landscape mode when I turned the Touch Diamond on its side. The aspect ratio was off, however, and audio ran about 2 to 3 seconds ahead of the video feed.

The handset supports TeleNav's excellent voice-enabled turn-by-turn GPS directions service (it's rebranded as Sprint Navigator and costs $9.99 per month, or $2.99 per day). The built-in instant-messaging client works with AIM, Yahoo!, and Windows Live Messenger accounts; you can rotate the screen here and type on a wider (but three-row, and therefore still cramped) on-screen keyboard. Sprint also packs in Handmark's Pocket Express information aggregator.

The Touch Diamond's 3.2-megapixel camera takes sharp, detailed, but grayish photos. Its shutter speed is very slow because the autofocus tends to fuss around before finding a lock. The device also records jerky, dim, 352-by-288-pixel video files. In video playback tests, a 320-by-240-pixel clip of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was moderately smooth (with choppy spots) in landscape mode. However, a 640-by-480-pixel AVI played back at only about two frames per second, just slightly faster than a photo slideshow.

Music sounded full and warm, if a bit muffled, over a paired set of Cardo S-2 stereo Bluetooth headphones, but subpar using the included, tinny wired earbuds. Fiddling with the included Audio Booster graphic EQ helped, but not much. You can buy music tracks over the air via Sprint's Music Store.

The Touch Diamond is easily the sexiest phone on the market running Windows Mobile. It's also plenty powerful and, aside from the battery life issue (which, admittedly, is a big one), the handset generally performs well, particularly as a mobile Web browser. In short, it's an ambitious touch-screen handset that never quite manages to overcome its clumsy operating system. Business smartphone buyers on Sprint should look hard at the excellent BlackBerry Curve 8330 (our current Editors' Choice) before choosing the Touch Diamond, even if lacks the flashier, prettier interface. If you don't need Microsoft Exchange support, document editing, or third-party app capability, and you don't mind a lower-resolution screen, Sprint's Samsung Instinct does much of what the Touch Diamond does (even though it's not a full-flown smartphone) for just $129 with a two-year contract. Both of those devices are more solid and reliable choices for Sprint subscribers.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 2 hours 54 minutes
Spb Benchmark Index: 421.24
CPU Index: 2185.87
File System Index: 171.93
Graphics Index:1592.27

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