Touch Diamond

image courtesy Engadget

Ran into an old friend in the elevator today. He had a new phone. T'was the HTC Touch Diamond (Sprint Version, though I hear there's an AT&T version to be released soon). Here are my initial impressions:

1. Holy crow!* Resistive-touch screen technology has come a very very very long way since the XV6700. This thing has a relatively smooth upper surface, no little dips at either end of the screen.
2. The phone UI, Touch Flo 3D I believe, is much more finger friendly. Unfortunately, the screen's the same size as my XV6700. It's much smaller than my XV6700, though, and oodles lighter.
3. Screen is relatively bright, but not quite as bright as the iPhone (you guys will get very tired of my constant comparisons, I'm sure, but the iPhone is still the state-of-the-art in a number of technologies)
4. Stylus is still necessary for navigating a lot of the sub menus (TouchFlo only goes so deep before you're back to the not so great Win Mo UI)
5. The HTC keyboard is definitely an improvement over the basic WinMo keyboard, but it's still just a software keyboard.
   

Didn't get to try the web or any games on it, but I'm sure it's the Windows Mobile standard. Decent smartphone, but without a tactile keyboard or any haptic response, it's not the most friendly for anyone who texts or emails often.

*(I just read Twilight, and found that to be the most amusing exclamation ever. Oh censorship.)

[drools] Prettyness...

Image grace à GeekInc

So, I happened upon this gorgeous thing, called the HTC Touch HD (it's on the right of the above photo, if you didn't guess already). The screen is MASSIVE at 3.8" diagonally, and it really looks amazing. Granted, it's Windows Mobile, but I seriously can't wait to play around with this. Here's the info from Engadget:

"We're still sans a press release, but a friendly tipster found this quite official page at HTC's very own site, depicting the sexy Touch HD from every angle, with every spec exposed. The rumors were naturally spot on, but that doesn't mean we're any less enthused about the 3.8-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera, and 3.5mm audio jack. Connectivity-wise we've got Europe-friendly HSDPA, GPS / A-GPS, 802.11g WiFi (we weren't clear on that one before), Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR and a microSD slot. On the software side there's TouchFLO 3D on top of Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro. There's also a front-facing VGA camera for video calls, 512MB of ROM and 288MB of RAM. HTC expects the 1350 mAh battery to score you 390 minutes of 3G talk and 450 ours of 3G standby, with 120 minute video calls just for kicks. The phone measures 12mm thick. Still no word on availability, price, or how you're ever going to stop us from cramming Android onto this thing."

UPDATE: It isn't coming stateside, says HTC :-( Here's the news release, via Twitter.