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.

Hauppauge WinTV USB Stick with Dual tuners

I have been using one of the Hauppauge Win-TV Nova-T USB sticks for a while with my Vista Media Center without any issues. However, there have been a number of occasions when it would have been useful to have had access to two tuners.

With this in mind, I decided to upgrade to the Dual tuner version of the USB stick. For around £50-60, this looks like a bargain. The USB stick is only slightly bigger than the single tuner version and I thought that it was going to be a dawdle to set up. After all, the single tuner version was a breeze - just plug it in and let Vista find the drivers for it automatically and it worked first time.

Well, this only half worked with the dual tuner version. In fact, it exactly half worked because, while it seemed to install correctly, I could only access one tuner and not two.

Here's how I did it:

1. Remove the old drivers if you have previously installed a Hauppauge USB stick. You can do this using the HCWclear application that you will find on the CD that shipped with the device. If you want the latest version of the software, you will find it here: http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/support/support_digital.html


2. You need to install the Diversity tool that is on the product CD. I have an aversion for bloatware and generally do not install software that comes with a product unless I really have to or it is a key part of the product. Again, this tool in contained on the product CD and it is possible just to install this tool (it is the checkbox at the bottom of the list). Once you have installed it, launched the application from the Start button and select dual tuner. For some reason, this seems to be set to single tuner mode by default. Strange. Can't imagine why someone would pay the extra money for the dual tuner version of the product and then use it in single tuner mode. You would be better off buying the single tuner version and saving the extra money.
3. Reboot. Media center finds this "new" dual tuner device and insists on going back through the setup process, but once done it works a treat.
   

Anyway, having been through these three simple steps, Vista Media Center can see both of the tuners. If you had previously installed it in single tuner mode, it will need to go through the re-scanning process again, but it will work afterwards.

Intel Atom DG945GCLF Motherboard

Just built a mini ITX PC using one of these motherboards. The motherboard has one of the Intel Atom processor onboard (230 clocked at 1.6Ghz). Probably the most remarkable thing about this processor is its power consumption of around 5W. The motherboard does have a fan, but it is on the graphics processor and not the CPU.

The motherboard was bought from Tranquil in the UK and set me back £42 (excluding VAT and delivery). I fitted it into a Noah 3988 case with a 500GB 7200rpm SATA drive, 1GB RAM and a slimline format CD/DVD drive. It is powered by an external power block and DC-DC board.

This combination is very quiet and produces so little heat that I could probably disconnect the fan in the case, leaving just the fan on the graphics processor.

I installed Vista Ultimate onto the machine. It installs without any issues and the CD that is supplied with the motherboard contains all the relevant drivers. The CD even recognise that it was installing on a Vista machine. The aero UI on Vista came up first time with the drivers on the CD. The network also installed without any issues. The audio took a little more fiddling with to get it to work.

The screen capture above shows the performance figures that I got out of the machine once I had installed the drivers from the CD enclosed with the motherboard. There is a definite improvement in video performance with these drivers - the graphics increased from 2.0 to 4.2 and the gaming graphics increased from 2.4 to 2.8.

When running Vista, this unit is pulling between 30-40W (most of the time it runs at about 33W). Exactly the same configuration with a D201GLY2A motherboard (Intel Celeron processor running at 1.2GHz) pulls about 40 - 50W (averaging around 45W). Because the Intel Atom is generating less heat, I unplugged the internal case fan. In hindsight, this was pretty pointless - it saves about 1.5-2W and makes very little audible difference to the running of the unit.

With this configuration, this unit is pretty quiet and would make an ideal candidate for a small format Vista Media Center. However, the motherboard's very limited video output capability (a single VGA connector) probably limits it's use in this department. Personally, I have been using the Linksys DMA-2200 Media Extender to connect to my TV via HDMI. So the lack of video connectivity is less of an issue.

I have a Hauppauge Dual Tuner TV USB stick that I will put into this machine and test out in the next few days.

Bob Carlos Clarke - The Dark Summer

I have managed to pick up a second hand copy of Bob Carlos Clarke's The Dark Summer. It seems to becoming pretty hard to get hold of. I can't believe that it is 20 years since I went to his exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath. I always regretted not buying the book at the time and it seems really weird to buy it 20 years later!

The images are stunning and looking back on these images you can see how far this genre of photography has come in the last twenty years - much of it due to the BCC influences.

The images are deep and dark with definite Goth style overtones. What makes this book even more remarkable is that many of the images are either hand coloured or the result of multiple negative printing. Today, such images would be easily replicated using digital techniques and this book underlines BCC's skill as a traditional printer although he will be remembered for his skills as a photographer foremost.