Nerd Fact Sheet:

Interface:

At first I read many reviews complaining about the Diamond's suffering ability to navigate through menus without lagging but with my first real hands-on experience with the Diamond, it didnt seem as bad as it sounded.

Although it may have been a tad bit unresponsive and had some trouble recognising my finger, the Diamond managed to scroll through the TouchFLO interface to browse images and look through text messages quite smoothly.

It was only recently that I found there was a dedicated graphics chip in the Touch Diamond, otherwise I would believe the absence of one would piss off a regular user of this phone.

The image gallery on the TouchFLO interface was one of the more interesting things that the Diamond featured. Browsing images was done through flicking photos up and down, and tapping a photo would view it full screen.

When viewing a picture full screen, TouchFLO would recognise special gestures to perform a specific task, e.g. making a small clockwise circle gesture with your fingers will zoom into the photo. Quite a cool alternative to multi-touch.

The D-pad located at the below the screen, is also touch sensitive, and a circle gesture around the pad also activates the zooming feature, while viewing photos.

Texting/typing:

With my 5 minute experience with texting on the Diamond, I felt much more comfortable with the virtual QWERTY keypad that was on the Diamond than that of the iPhone. Although I have uber geek friends who can "get used to" the undersized virtual QWERTY keyboard on the iPhone and can type extremely fast, the Diamond provided a larger alternative and was easy to get used to.

Multimedia/Camera:

Of course being at the store, I didnt get to properly play with these features. Seeing the results from GSM Arena make HTC designers look stupid. They had made the back cover which has a thick plastic which distorts and blurs the image when it goes through the lens and sensor. This was proven as GSM Arena tried taking a photo with and without the back cover, and the results were significantly different.

Although a 3.15 megapixel camera on such a high end phone is fairly mediocre, phones are not made to be cameras. I commend HTC's effort to actually put an autofocus camera into their handset (which, unfortunately is absent in the HTC Touch 3G).

Multimedia is excellent according to GSM Arena's review, and according to them, video playback seemed fine. Having done some research, Windows Mobile is excellent for having a large sea of third-party applications made for the OS. Unfortunately the Diamond does not include a DivX video player, but there is one available from the official DivX site.

Other choices/Availability:

The new alternative to the Touch Diamond that HTC had released is the Touch Pro, which is pretty much has an identical design idea as the Diamond. The Touch Pro, which is a couple of millimetres thicker, sports a favourable slide-out physical QWERTY keyboard and twice the RAM for faster graphics processing.

The Samsung Omnia, from Optus, is also a new comer and new rival. It does not have the screen resolution of the Touch Diamond, but has a larger screen, and a 5 megapixel camera.

The 1337 verdict:

I think the HTC Touch Diamond has been given probably too much bad reviews by people and if you are considering to buy one, test one out yourself to see much lag there actually is.

As much as I hate lag and virtual keyboards, the Touch Diamond didnt seem too affected by them. The Diamond was interesting and scored points for having a great interface with mind-blowingly high resolution screen and extremely small form factor despite having a tad bit of lag which wont disturb your normal use.

This phone is worth getting... providing that you can afford it. Because I cant xD

Reviewed 8th November 2008

Editied and Updated 26th Janurary 2009

(HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY!)