HTC Diamond: Some sparkle, some downsides

HTC's Touch Diamond, a new offering from Sprint, is yet another veritable "Swiss Army knife" of a smart phone. Running on Windows Mobile and $250 with a 2-year contract, it boasts a 3.1-megapixel digital camera, 4GB of internal memory, GPS navigation, 3G capability, and Wi-Fi. The phone comes preloaded with a plethora of programs and services, ranging from games and RSS feeds to TV and YouTube.

But just as you can wrestle with the plethora of doo-dads on a knife, in early tests of the Touch Diamond (Click on the image at right for a closer look.) we found it took a little effort to master its many functions. Moreover, running multiple applications tended to slow phone performance, and closing them was complicated.

But those drawbacks weren't deal-breakers. Here are some facets of the Diamond we liked, along with a few more downsides.

A dazzling screen. The 2.8-in. touch-screen display has twice the resolution (480x640) of the iPhone. Just double-tap the screen to zoom in on Web pages or slide your finger over to pan. On the downside, the display is difficult to read in bright light.

Plenty of ways to connect and locate. We browsed the Web easily via Internet Explorer or Opera and download files quite readily via 3G when a Wi-Fi connection wasn't available—and the 3G network was. The built-in speech recognition lets you make phone calls, open programs, play back music, get calendar information, and more, just by uttering predefined commands. Web searches—both typed in and spoken—factor in your GPS location, making it easy to find local businesses and products.

Versatile interface. Like the iPhone, the Touch Diamond has a built-in accelerometer that automatically rotates the screen image from portrait to landscape when you tilt the phone. In addition to the virtual keypad, it offers three virtual keyboards from which to choose: condensed, standard, or full QWERTY. Or, you can use the included stylus (cleverly held in place by a magnet) to jot down numbers, letters, symbols, and punctuation, which the phone then converts to typed text. This is a full-fledged smart phone, so you can create and edit Office documents. Its interface is similar to Windows, which makes navigation intuitive to PC users. In our tests, the Diamond synchronized easily with Microsoft Outlook on a PC. It was also easy to switch between applications and run multiple programs.

Decent basic performance. The Diamond had very good voice quality when talking, good when listening—on a par with other CDMA phones. Talk time was and an adequate 3.25 hours and keypad readability was good under most lighting conditions.

A fairly good camera. The Diamond's camera, which has autofocus, can record video and supports USB printing—all attributes lacking on the iPhone's camera, for example. But there's no flash and the camera had trouble taking decent-quality pictures in high-contrast lighting situations, such as when the subject was in the shade and the background was bright and sunny.

No expandable storage. While Touch Diamond's 4GB of internal memory is generous, there's no memory-card slot to expand its capacity.

In our tests, the Touch Diamond proved to be a capable though not outstanding phone. It's an iPhone alternative for those who are committed to Sprint—which, by the way, has been the worst wireless provider in our Ratings of cellphone service providers (available to subscribers) in recent years.

—Mike Gikas