Sprint HTC Touch Diamond Review
The Touch Diamond’s 2.8-inch touch screen is gorgeous, mostly because of its VGA resolution. The device auto adjusts the backlight based on the surrounding lighting conditions. The screen is flat, with no bezel surrounding it, making it easy to touch items in the corner of the display. The Touch Diamond’s 3.2MP autofocus camera took excellent pictures, though there isn’t a flash, so you’ll definitely need adequate surrounding light. Video quality for a mobile device wasn’t too shabby, either. The touch screen itself is responsive to a stylus tap, fingernail, and even the pad of our finger. Thanks to TouchFLO 3D, you can easily scroll through nearly any menu by simply dragging the pad of your finger up or down the screen.
Battery life seems to drain a little quicker than we’d like. The phone typically lasted about 24 hours with fairly light use, with some voice conversations, and the occasional weather information download. Data activity and long voice communications drained the battery faster. As long as you’re able to charge the phone every night, or even possibly once during the day, battery life shouldn’t be a huge issue, however. It’s possible that HTC could improve upon battery life in the future with a ROM update, though the company’s representatives couldn’t comment on future updates at this time. As a whole, even though the Touch Diamond’s battery life wasn’t something to brag about, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker, either.
Another complaint we’ve heard about the Touch Diamond is regarding connectivity and dropped / missed calls. We did not experience any of these issues during testing, though it’s possible that different areas of the country may experience different coverage issues. This is another issue that could theoretically be addressed in a future ROM update, but we were unable to confirm anything with our HTC contact.
Sprint’s version of the Touch Diamond supports EVDO Rev. A for fast Internet browsing. When such a connection is not available, or when you want even faster speeds, you can activate the phone’s Wi-Fi capabilities, assuming a hotspot is available.
The phone has a healthy 4GB of internal storage available for all of your files, movies, photos, and applications. Although many users will find this storage to be adequate, there are also many of us who would have no problems filling the phone to capacity. Sadly, HTC didn’t include a memory card expansion slot, so 4GB is all you get.
In our tests, call quality was good, and we had no problem pairing the phone with a Bluetooth headset. We could hear everyone we called clearly both through the phone and through the headset, and no one complained of the sound on the other end, either.
