Post your reviews here for all of us to see.

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...

I hear ya, but they manage to do it on the iPhone, which is thinner than the Diamond. Granted it's taller, but I think most of that is due to the increase in screen real estate. I think Apple accomplished this through the design of an ultra slim USB port (albeit proprietary), which leaves them more room for the headphone jack. If adding a standard jack increased the length by an 1/8 of an inch, I'd happily take it

If you check over at WMExperts, they have a video of some french people playing with the Touch HD....that thing is the same size as the iPhone, but has a higher resolution screen and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Anyhow, about your review, this is pretty much what I expected. After watching a ton of reviews on the Diamond on YouTube, I was thinking to myself "why do you want to get rid of your Touch?" The only real difference is the higher resolution screen and the faster cpu. All the faster cpu and the video drivers do is to create that eye candy called Touch Flo 3d. If I want to, I can download Touch 2d from XDA and it will be pretty darn close to what the real deal looks like.....but....I haven't done that yet, simply because I like my own current setup better. So really, the one thing the phone does better than the touch besides the higher screen resolution, is a mute point, since I'd rather create my own "theme" instead of using Touch Flo 3d. Maybe I will be swayed some more when I get to play with this thing in person, but I highly doubt it. I like my 8 GB storage card, and my 2000 mha battery that serves me so well, and I like the wideness of the Touch because it feels comfortable in the hand. All this and the preview of the Touch HD makes it a lot easier for me to pass on the Diamond and wait for the next bout of technology to hit us next year....probably with Windows Mobile 7!

Do you think you might return it and keep the touch?

Oh...you mentioned the Task Manager...I never use the Stylus on my phone, and with that one cab file I found that uses big icons for the Task Manager, using it has never been easier. It also cured that nasty little 6.1 bug where the task manager would open on the left side instead of the right side.

Good review 8....as usualy, very much on point and not sugar coating anything!

Aren't both screens basically 2.8" (Touch and Diamond), if there's a difference it's in millimeters, maybe in width. Just seemed kind of odd to lump the Touch in with the iPhone at 3.5".

Adobe LE should already zoom (but not reflow)

For me at least, it's definitely a worthwhile upgrade from the touch. There's a bit more to it then higher resolution.

Also, i'm probably going to ditch tf3d because the email/sms portions of the interface don't seem very practical.

And a remappable button on the side would have been nice (the default only allows you to remap send long press).

Also kind of lame they took out Sprite backup.

I totally agree. I'm really confused by the "less screen real estate" complaint. The touch and the diamond both have 2.8" screens

You guys are both correct. The combination of the overall width and the higher resolution gave me the illusion that it was a smaller screen. My apologies!

On a side note, I'm really starting to like this phone a lot. Some of my original complaints still stand (battery life, sound quality), but I'm really enjoying many of the software enhancements that HTC added to the Diamond.

Well let see;

Diamond pros:
VGA resolution
3.2 MegaPixel camera
smaller
some slick programs e.g. TouchFlo 3d, youtube application etc.

Diamond cons:
poor sound quality
Stability unknown
no removable memory
six hundred bucks
no camera flash
no keyboard

Thouch Pros:
Micro Sd card
Solid as a rock
Still looks good
Already paid for
Rubberized finish (I'm not quite sure why ALL phones don't have this)

Touch cons:
No camera flash
No keyboard
Not new

Looks like a no brainer to me, there ain't nothing on the Diamond Pros list that's worth six hundred bucks, poor sound quality and non removable secondary memory.

I'll look again when the Touch Pro is available.

__________________
Don't mess with old futs...age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill! B. S. and brilliance only come with age and experience!

I've had a few days with the onscreen keyboard now & it is a huge improvement over the Touch's. It is much more accurate, and seems to keep up with me better. I also like that they moved the ABC/T9 button to the upper right corner, away from the space key. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally toggled different input modes when I was using the Touch.

I also had frequent lockups with the Nav on my Touch & haven't yet come across that on the Diamond, so at least for me there's a huge benefit.

What about:
Tilt Sensor
Stylus Sensor
Better build quality
WiFi
Double the program memory
Scroll/Zoom (The bottom panel is supposed to be multi touch capable too)

The VGA is pretty huge for me.

All that being said, I doubt i'd upgrade to any phone for $600.

Tilt sensor - works great and is just as fast as the iPhone in rotating the screen. I expected this feature to be buggy, but hasn't been at all.

Stylus sensor - this is a really NICE touch. When the phone is in standby, pull the stylus out to take it out of standby. Pull it out while on a phone call & the Notes application automatically opens.

Build quality - It's too early for me to comment on this, but my initial impressions are great. I will say that there appears to be some *slight* light leakage around the parameter of the screen. This is most noticeable in a dark room.

WiFi - Not much to say here - works great.

Program memory - Current reading: 203 Mb total, 93 Mb in use, 109 Mb free. Current programs active: Opera, Soti Pocket Controller, Outlook.

Storage memory - A definite downgrade from the Touch (141 Mb), to the Diamond (90 Mb).

Scroll/Zoom - Slight learning curve, but works well.

VGA - Of course VGA looks great & I love it. However there are some programs that either aren't compatible or don't look that great on a VGA screen. Nothing earth shattering, but something to consider.

Anybody know what happens when (not if for me) you lose your stylus?

__________________
Don't mess with old futs...age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill! B. S. and brilliance only come with age and experience!

I guarantee that I will lose both of mine at some point. It happens with every PDA phone I've ever owned. The advantage with the Diamond, is that it is magnetic and won't fall out, like they did on the 6700 (or was it the Mogul?).

Anyway Boxwave is the only site I know of that sells accessories for the Diamond. They show a stylus 3-pack, but it doesn't look right to me. I would probably email they before I ordered.

I also see a bunch listed on Ebay, but they all appear to be for the GSM version.