Yesterday HTC announced the HTC Touch Diamond their latest phone.

I have an original HTC Touch so I guess I am their target market for this new model.

With phones these days its all about the user experience, so Leigh from www.coolsmartphone.com has uploaded a hands on clip. See below

It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 not that you can tell from the user interface. It seems HTC has done their best to hide it (not a bad thing). Notice the Internet Browser in the clip is Opera not IE.

In summary it now offers a user experience that comes near to that of the iPhone but is a true Windows Mobile phone. Something the iPhone will never be.

The one thing that amazes me about the Windows Mobile OEM’s is how long it took them to start innovating on their own platform. Perhaps innovating is the wrong word, copying  Apple would be a better description.

What Apple does next in the revision of their hardware (next month) will be interesting.

Link: www.htc.com

Well first of all any photograph you have seen of the HTC Touch doesn’t really do it justice.

When I opened this box the “oh, now that is cool” was my first impression.

I have been using the phone for nearly a month and to date this phone is the most reliable Windows Mobile device I have used. No crashes, freezes or other problems to report.

A month later the Touch Flo interface has proved not to be just a gimmick I can flick between the different screens single handed and make calls with just my thumb. A great user interface improvement.

I do miss not having a physical keyboard but you cant have anything.

The 802.11 wireless works flawlessly which is a cheap way of allowing me to play with Google Maps/Live Search without using my orange data package.

The voice call quality seems to be as good as any phone I have used over the recent years. No problems here.

Battery life seems to be an issue for some people but now I have calmed down and stopped “playing” with my new phone its not a problem. I can go two or three days without worrying about it.

The loudspeaker is great for a device this small. Last weekend I was installing a Network in a deserted office so I loaded up some music on the 1gb mini sd card.

My only criticisms are:-

Copying data to the mini SD memory is slow if you connect the phone to your PC over USB

Fitting the mini SD memory and the phone sim  is a bit too tricky.

The reflective nature of the screen does not make it easy for viewing video. You can do it but you have to view it at a slightly off angle. But lets put that in perspective this is a phone not a portable media sever.

Conclusion

There is a big decision to be made around the issue of the keyboard, if you can live without one the HTC Touch is a great phone other wise you have to go HTC 730 or HTC TYTNII.

The Touch range also comes in Touch Dual (has a slide out keypad) Touch Cruise (this has inbuilt GPS).

So a month on I have zero regrets about the HTC Touch. What a cracking little phone.

Official Link: HTC Touch

On related HTC News any phone geek’s should check out this recent interview the CEO of HTC

Link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/10/the-engadget-interview-peter-chou-ceo-of-htc/

Ok, now this is cool, Google have just updated Google Maps for mobile and it can now work out your location based on your proximity to the the cell tower that your mobile is connected to.

Now this isn’t as accurate as having a GPS enabled device but only 15% of devices are GPS enabled.

I tried it and found it to be very accurate identifying my location to within 500 metres.

Link: http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html

About this update: http://www.google.com/gmm/mylocation.html?hl=en

1) Windows Live Search

Windows Live Search on a mobile  is better than Google search on a PC. You can browse by Category based on your location and follow that up with map based directions and route planners.  Very impressive.

Download on your phone via: www.wls.live.com

2) Google Maps

Google maps is another great free map application It has many options like looking up your contacts, getting directions etc. Although some of what is does can be done by Windows Live Search you may as well have both applications installed, neither take up that much room.

Download: http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html

3) TCPMP The Core Pocket Media Player

This can be used to play back multiple audio/video formats like avi/xvid for example.

Windows Mobile devices can make a great portable media players, particularly the ones with the larger screens.

Download from: http://www.pqdvd.com/download/tcpmp.setup.0.66.exe

4) Google’s java based Gmail client

If you have a Google email account this Java application supplied by Google is the best way to access your Gmail account on a Windows mobile, the user experience has been designed from the ground up to work within the constraints of a small screen.

Download: http://www.google.com/mobile/mail/index.html

I will update this post if I find any other, if you want to share some your suggestions please use the comments section.

I was a bit under whelmed by the announcement but now having seen it I am really impressed.

Now things are going to get interesting in the mobile space.

The iPhone is a walled garden you are locked into this, locked into that.

Windows Mobile is a more open platform allowing 3rd party developers to create applications but as I previously said they need to innovate and quickly.

Android is an open platform with some heavyweight support. Frustrated hardware manufactures are sick of Microsoft’s stranglehold of their hardware, in some respects holding them back.

Thanks to http://www.coolsmartphone.com for the link. Check out their site for peer reviews of Windows Mobile Phones.