HTC Touch Diamond2

Available now
16th February 2009

HTC is one of the most ruthlessly competitive mobile phone manufacturers in the world. Witness the new HTC Touch Diamond2 - an upgrade to the already impressive HTC Touch Diamond, and a phone that will give some of HTC's competitors a fright.

The first thing that you may notice is that the Touch Diamond2 doesn't look very much like the old Touch Diamond, The older phone was a glossy, somewhat whacky design and a real fingerprint magnet. The new Touch Diamond2 is altogether more restrained and is a very attractive looking phone that should have a wide appeal.

The main change is the display - this is now a 3.2" 480 x 800 pixel touch-sensitive panel, considerably better than the 2.8" 480 x 640 pixel screen on the older handset. The Touch Diamond2 is roughly the same size as the Touch Diamond, so the front of the phone has been redesigned, losing the navigation pad along the way. Look closely underneath the display and you can see a touch-sensitive zoom control, which allows you to zoom in and out of web pages with the minimum of effort.

On the back is a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, making it one of the best cameras on any Windows Mobile device. OK, for some reason Windows phones tend to have lousy cameras, but at least the Touch Diamond2 is keeping up with the competition.

Another key improvement is battery life. The old unit had a wimpy 900 mAh battery that drained quite quickly. The new Touch Diamond2 has a much better 1100 mAh battery that can power the handset for up to 5 hours talktime on 3G and an impressive 3 weeks standby time.

HTC have chosen to re-work their TouchFLO software, and it is now integrated deeper into the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, giving the Touch Diamond2 a much more consistent (if non-standard) interface. TouchFLO has been tweaked to make it more "touch friendly" too, which is useful seeing as the navigation key has been consigned to history.

Other features are a GPS receiver, WiFi, a multimedia player that can cope with an alphabet soup of formats (although notably, the Touch Diamond2 does not support DivX), the usual collection of Windows Mobile software and an FM radio. Audio output is via the HTC ExtUSB port rather than a standard audio jack.

The HTC Touch Diamond2 is a dual-band UMTS phone, supporting 900 and 2100 MHz HSDPA connections, and it also supports quad-band GSM. It is quite possible that a North American variant will follow with different frequencies. Internal RAM is a very useful 288 MB, and the processor is a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200A.

This is a very impressive smartphone. The larger display and smarter looks also make it a very distinctive looking device. The new version of HTC's TouchFLO software should attract new and old customers alike. If you are currently using the older HTC Touch Diamond, then this is almost definitely worth the upgrade.

We don't know how much the HTC Touch Diamond2 will cost, but it should be available during early Q2 2009 in major European and Asian markets. No doubt it will also be sold to carriers who will rebrand it (perhaps the T-Mobile MDA Compact V).