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I'm going to make this one brief, as I got home late last night & haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but here are my initial thoughts (will edit to add more content):

Size: The size of this device is comparable to the Blackberry Pearl. I'm not sure if this is a positive or a negative. On the one hand, it feels more like any other phone, but on the other hand the size comes at the expense of screen real estate. I must say, I thought the original Touch struck the right mix in that regard.

Visual Appearance: Aside from my notes on size, the appearance is the right mix of sexy & professional. The front side is a beautiful mix of shiny black housing & glossy touchscreen. The backside is merlot red, which I thought I would hate, but I am actually leaning toward indifferent/liking it.

Hardware buttons: There's a sufficient # of hardware buttons on the Diamond, which is a nice feature for those of us who went from the Mogul world to the Touch world and lost most of our beloved shortcut keys. The center wheel is probably the most challenging hurdle to overcome, until you get used to it. You need to understand that the rounded wheel surrounding the center button is for zooming in & out while in specific programs (e.g., Opera). You do not push down on any of the 4 corners of this circle to move the cursor a specific direction (e.g., when selecting a word in the T9 suggestion box). To do this you actually push down on the area outside of this, which might seem counter intuitive since it appears you would be pushing either the Home, Back, or one of the phone buttons. This is a difficult thing to describe, but once you use it and understand it, you will be much better off. I really wanted to throw the Diamond out the window until Chris (see below) straightened me out on this.

Screen: The resolution is beautiful. Reminds me of when I went from the Treo 600 to the Treo 650. It also reminds me of how that was several years ago, and HTC is just now releasing a device that has a screen this good. But I digress.... The screen is also small as I mentioned above. I really do prefer the footprint of the original Touch or the iPhone.

Touchflo3D: I think for a first time user, the HTC overlay to the backend WM6.1 OS would be fairly pleasing out of the box. I like it, but I'm so used to using the stock OS without all the bells and whistles, I may eventually turn all of this off. It's too early to say at this point. They have done a pretty good job on this.

Network: I can't help but notice that the network speed on this phone doesn't seem as fast. It takes a long time for pages to load in Opera & they are somehow compressing images, instead of leaving them in full resolution. Not cool.

Sound quality: Compared to the Touch it's terrible. They took a speaker that sounds like 10 dollars and turned it into one that sounds like .99

Battery: 2 phone calls lasting a total of 1 hour & some casual playtime earlier this morning dropped the battery down to 40%. I expected this long before I ordered the Diamond, based on similar experiences with the Touch. But I must say I will really miss the full day of heavy usage I was getting out of the Touch with the 2100 mAh extended battery.

UI: This device, like it's predecessors, will continue to rely on the use of a stylus. I'm not sure if this is pro or a con. In some ways I like using the stylus. There are other times however, where it just doesn't make sense to have to pull it out. For example, accessing the task manager (upper right corner), is a chore without the stylus.

Some cool builtin utilities/features:

- "Update PRL" utility
- Cool new ringtones
- RSS hub
- Quick GPS (to speed the process of picking up GPS coordinates)
- MP3 trimmer
- Audio Booster

Why did they leave in that dog of a Windows Mobile calculator, instead of including their own?

So in summary, you might think I hate this device based on all my negative feedback. I was expecting an "iPhone" type out of the box experience - with all the benefits that Windows Mobile has to offer. So far I think the Diamond fails in that regard, but the more I play with it, the more I might like it. So right now I'm going to give it a 6/10. I will keep editing this as I've used it more. I'd say the major downsides are the speaker & the battery life at the moment.

I was having this problem until i thought the left was already broken. Turns out the button are NOT the circle, if you press outside the circle it will work perfectly So for left hit the center of the three (home, talk, and left side of the circle) and that is actually where the button is. Also the Center Button is used to focus the camera (touch to focus, press to take picture).

Hmmm that certainly does make a difference, I will play with it some more and edit my review accordingly. Thanks!

so is this kinda of like the Moguls button? if so, then that wont be a problem for me.

thanks for the post 8, puts some thigns in perspective for me.

now i need to hear from someone who had a Mogul and went to this... screen and the navi button.

It is like the Moguls and its not. I came from a Mogul. Imagine the Moguls D-pad(well i guess you can look at it) now imagine the center of the D-pad is "cut out" and you can press the center of it without the raised outline going anywhere. On the Mogul the raised outline controls the direction. On the Diamond this raised outline is used for zooming purposes(word excell, wished it worked in adobe LE ). I at first too thought it was used for direction however was wrong. To navigate on the Diamond you have to press outside the raised ridge. If you did this on the Mogul there is no question you would be pressing the other buttons (softkeys and such). Hope this clears it up. BTW I think I'm gonna write something up after I use it for a week.

This picture fully illustrates why I want HTC to add a standard 3.5mm jack as some other poplular phones are doing. In order to both charge my device, and use my headset, I must do this:

that isnt so bad if you are at your desk... you dont want me to take a pic of the mess my desk is.

a dedicated 3.5mm jack takes up too much real estate which is why its missing. with everyone wanting smaller devices, you have to sacrifice something. its already crammed in there as it is with your internal flash drive, a separate antenna for the GPS, CDMA, Bluetooth AND WIFI, then space for the battery, electronics... all in a phone the size of a box or virginia slims... and you can se that not everything can be included...