HTC Touch Diamond

But the type of person who's going to opt for the Touch Diamond isn't the sort of person who also wants to hold back on what they do of a weekend just so they can eke out a bit more battery. And for those people, the life could easily disappear during that time.

In the end, HTC's choice of a 900mAh battery will, for many, be a compromise too far.

The little things

The final bundle of issues to fling into that Bad bowl are a diverse bunch. Top of the list must be the lack of memory expansion: though many people will be happy with the 4GB of memory (which in itself is a Good point), just as many won't.

We're also unconvinced by the button system. There are four shortcut buttons: home, back, dial and end call. To select left, right, up and down, you have to press just to the relevant side of the central "activate" button. It works, but again it's fiddly. Give us the trackball of the RIM BlackBerry Pearl any day.

Finally, we were disappointed to discover no case in the box. So HTC has spent lots of money making the packaging look like a great big diamond, but it hasn't bothered to provide screen protecion out of the box. Misguided priorities, anyone?

The good points

Thankfully, there are several things we really like about the Touch Diamond.

Prime among these is the web browser, based on Opera Mobile 9.5. Coupled with the also-excellent 480 x 640 resolution screen, it makes even mobile-unfriendly sites like - we admit it - www.pcpro.co.uk easy to navigate.

Browsing is made all the more pleasant courtesy of HSDPA support. Don't expect sites to appear instantly, but in 3G or 3.5G areas you'll be left waiting for a handful of seconds rather than the half-minute you may have become used to.

Reach for the Gyro

We're also fans of the built-in gyroscopic accelerometer. In reality, that simply means the Touch Diamond knows how you're holding it - whether in portrait or landscape mode for instance. It will then adapt the screen automatically to match.

To take advantage, HTC even bundles a clever marbles-down-the-hole game, where you direct the marble depending on how you're holding it. It's oddly compulsive too.

The physical side

HTC has long impressed us with its hardware designs, and the Touch Diamond is no different. It's extremely compact and incredibly light: just 110g. You won't notice this phone in your pocket.

And, though some might turn their nose up at the diamondesque patterns on its reverse, it certainly isn't dull. What's more, and unlike the iPhone, you can easily remove the back if you need to replace the battery at a future point.

Ying and Yang

Don't get us wrong: in many ways we like the TouchFLO 3D interface. Being able to launch a web browser, email, photos and videos and music without being dumped back into Windows Mobile 6.1 is a big plus.

Or...it...would...be...if...it...didn't...take...so...long...to...switch.

Conclusion

Back when we reviewed the HTC Touch, we had one key message to say to HTC: drop Windows Mobile so far back into the background that people hardly need to use it. And it has.

But it's simultaneously crippled the Touch Diamond by either using code that isn't good enough, thus making the whole phone sluggish, or it hasn't chosen a fast enough processor. We suspect the former as the 528MHz Qualcomm unit powering the Diamond doesn't look like its struggling for horsepower.

And who knows, maybe in a few months' time its engineers will have done some clever tweaking and updating to make the interface work as it should. At which point, this could turn into a half-decent phone.