HTC Touch Diamond - Great concept, almost a great product

But not quite. It has some great design features, but it has too many flaws for it to consider great.

First things first. If you are going to set high user expectations (and then you allow you Marketing department to overhype them), you had better deliver. Unfortunately, the HTC doesn't. The main problem is that the user interface (called TouchFlo 3D) does everything, but flow. The user interface stutters on occasion leading to a number of false selections and while it has some great ideas, it is just to fiddly in practice to be workable.

There are some really cool features:

• Putting the phone face down when ringing mutes the ringer. Nice design as it mimics exactly the action that I perform when my phone rings in meetings. Would I have guessed that it would work this way? Probably not. I guess that's what makes it a cool design that no one would ever guess.


• It s possible to reject a call and have the phone automatically text the caller that you will ring them back when free. Not sure if this is a new feature of Windows Mobile 6.1, but either way it is a cool feature.


• The phone going into vibrate mode when in a meeting according to your calendar. Nice.


• Rather than using strokes on the navigation tabs, press on the active tab and (while keeping the pressure on) move our finger to the left or right until the relevant icon is selected. Stroking the main screen, just selects the previous or next icon depending on the direction of the stroke. This makes the touchscreen interface much more usable.


• It is very easy to set up multiple email accounts – I have two setup – outlook for my corporate email, and POP3 access for my CompuServe account


• Threaded SMS messages really help keep track of conversations. Again not sure if this is specific to this phone or Windows Mobile 6.1, but either way still a neat feature.
  Envelope views for new emails. I find this surprisingly useful and quick to use. I frequently get a couple of hundred emails a day and this is a quick way to browse them.
  

But there are a number of negatives:

• The keypad disappears when you are in a call. This is NOT useful when you are trying to navigate your voicemail using touchtones – you make the call, then the keypad disappears. It can take a few seconds to get it back – press the button on the top of the phone followed by the keypad icon in the icon tray – by which time, your voicemail has timed out! I can’t find any settings to control this. Argh!


• The user interface is not smooth enough. For example, when trying to scroll down a long list of options, it is not unusual for the list to stop all of a sudden as it is presumably thinking about displaying the next part of the list. But what makes this even more frustrating is that the phone will often then select the option currently in viewing when the list halted. Argh! Pressing the back key sends you to the top of the list, where you start the whole process again! The Back key should send you back to where you were in the list before the option was selected, NOT the top of the list (which would be the equivalent of pressing the Back key twice!).


• Some of the icons and buttons are too smaller. Who is these designed for? Squirrels? For example, the OK button in the top right hand corner of many of the standard Windows Mobile dialogs is too small for most adult (human) fingers. Now, since these are standard WM dialogs, I am a little sympathetic. Where I have a bigger issue (and bone to pick!) is where these are custom UIs that have been developed. For example, if you set up more than one email account, you end up with buttons for the different accounts on the main Mail screen. You can only really access these using the stylus.


• Why didn’t they package the device with some GPS software? Even it is were only a trial version. It is like buying a car with world class speakers installed by default, but no radio! What good is half a solution? Installing demo GPS software would have demonstrated the capability of the device much better. I found myself checking the specs on the outside of the packaging to see if it really did GPS! After all, there was nothing on the device that would indicate it. And surely, a percentage of those folks who use the trial software would have purchased the full product?

In short, cool features are great, but you need to get the basics right. Maybe an update to the software will make all the difference, on the other hand, maybe the problems are down to a more fundamental limitation of the phone's hardware. Hopefully, HTC can work it out.

Adding ringtones to the HTC Touch Diamond

The HTC Touch Diamond is an interesting phone - I will write up some notes once I have had a little more experience with it (it takes some getting used to!), but in the meantime here's how to upload your own ringtone to the device.

While the device prides itself on usability, this was not obvious and I had to revert to reading the manual - something I don't expect to have to do with a phone. In fact, I have probably had 15+ different phones over the last 15 or so years. In the early years, I always had to read the manuals, then I discovered Nokia phones. Guess what, once I had learnt to use one, I seemed to be able to use any model Nokia. Needless to say, I became a loyal customer for many years, plus no more reading of manuals!

So having to revert to the manual for my latest phone was a real blast from the past! To save you the trouble of reading the manual (page 233, I think), here's how to add a ringtone.

1. First you will need to browse the file system on the phone. The easiest way to do this is to connect the phone to your laptop using a USB cable. If you are using Vista, it will install the necessary drivers and then display a dialog box asking you what you want to do. Select "open a folder"


2. Navigate to \My Documents on the phone and create a folder in called \My Ringtones in the \My Documents folder.


3. Drop your ringtone files into this directory.


4. Go to the Settings tab on the phone.


5. Select Sound. And then on this screen, scroll down until you get to Ringtones. This throw me for a while since I hadn’t realised that it was possible to scroll this page. The lack of scrollbars was the missing clue.


6. Once you open the Ringtones option, you can select your ringtone from the list. Easy, eh!

HTC could have done a couple of things to have made this process a little easier:

1. Create a \My Documents\My Ringtones directory on the phone by default. This would have been simple and require no changes to the software, just a minor change to the build. This would have been enough of a clue for me to work out what to do. If you want to provide more of a clue, why not put a sample ringtone in it which would have then appeared in the drop down list of ringtones?


2. Even better, when selecting a ringtone, why not allow the user to browse to a different file location on the device? This is the usual way of adding ringtones on other phones that I have had, but for some reason is missing on this phone. Shame.