HTC Touch Diamond

The Diamond looks like an HTC Touch Pro on a severe diet. It misses out on the hardware QWERTY and has a smaller battery which is why it’s slimmer and a lot lighter. The rear seems to be more solid and is finished in glossy black but a look at the front face and you cannot tell the Diamond and the Pro apart. The name Diamond comes from the sculpted rear that has been cut at various angles to give the appearance of many sides — like its namesake. Build quality is good and the Touch Diamond looks clean. It has 4 GB of internal storage but no expansion. The screen is a little devoid of colours but bright and crisp enough. Fonts are clearer than on the Touch Viva, although not the best around. Once again the lack of a dedicated keyboard cannot be made up for by the onscreen one, simply because of the prohibitively small screen size. The call buttons are touch activated and very well laid out and amply backlit, while the home and back button also aid navigation. In fact most other non-HTC devices do not have a back button and we feel this is a nifty and very utilitarian feature that

is simple to implement and should be standardised on all WM devices.

The camera on this phone is decent, actually a lot better than we expected; it outperforms some of the other 3.2 megapixel units in this test. The antenna is of mediocre quality and we had slight issues with clarity in zone 2. The earpiece volume itself is quite good. The handsfree is good enough for casual music listening and to make calls but music lovers obsessed with quality will find nothing of interest here. The lack of expansion beyond the 4 GB of inbuilt memory may also turn some people off. There’s nothing special about this handset to make it stand out. At a price tag of Rs. 18,990 users would surely expect more and we would expect a QWERTY keypad to make usability better.