HTC Touch Diamond Review – Tough, Powerful and Beautiful Too

As much as I might love any mobile phone, I’m far too practical to buy a phone that isn’t sturdy enough to stand up to the kind of use it’s going to get from me. My life is far too hectic and demanding to be willing to add any more work to it than I have already. Unfortunately, though, that’s combined with a real sweet tooth for technology and a hankering for a thing of beauty, too. That’s a tough set of contradictory demands to try to meet. So far – the HTC Touch Diamond Review is living up to those demands.

If you’ve read any of my other reviews you already know that I’m not a big fan of super light weight phones. Weighing in at 110 grams, the Touch Diamond is a happy compromise between sturdy and manageable, in terms of carrying it in something like my briefcase or laptop bag. I never travel lightly, and the Touch Diamond is light enough to carry around comfortably and yet tough enough to survive the ride, too, and both of those are important considerations to me.

While HTC definitely has a sweet tooth for extreme hyperbole like “stunning formation of brushed metal” or “exhilarating design”, even while rolling my eyes inwardly at the description I couldn’t help but rather grudgingly notice that my heart was beating faster and I was excited about testing and reviewing the phone. It’s sexy to behold.

For starters, the touch screen display is just rich and beautiful. HTC has a proprietary interface called TouchFLO 3D and there is even a 3D graphics processor. HTC uses 4 times the pixels in its display than most other touch screen phones, as well. While I can’t promise you that it all in all radically altered the look of the display, I can tell you that something was definitely different. It did have more of that high definition kind of look to it than I’ve been seeing in touch screen phones these days.

I am both a very visual and a very tactile person, and the Diamond really caters to people like that. The beautiful graphics combined with a touch screen that’s a pleasure to use makes this phone a pleasure to use for people like us.

My world is extremely connected, so high power user Internet capabilities are important. That is definitely one of the things that I love about this phone. It promises a broadband like experience when accessing the net, and at least during testing it totally delivered. The only thing missing from the broad band experience was an extremely large monitor.

I’m also an avid photographer and consider myself the historian for both my family and friends, so I hate missing a photo for the archives. The Touch Diamond has two cameras on the phone, and you can shoot photos that are up to 3.2 megabytes in resolution. I always enhance my photos during editing, including things like creating close ups or cropping, so 3.2 megabytes is a pretty minimum resolution for me to use, and probably for most people as well.

So far I would say that I highly recommend this phone, and I’m looking forward to further testing.