Now, there are a lot of things to absolutely fall in love with about the HTC Touch Diamond. Some of which are small, but make a big difference.
- You know how when you call someone, you have to hold the phone up to your ear and listen to it ring and ring and ring and wait until they pick up? The Touch Diamond has an awesome little feature where instead of doing that, you dial the call and just hold the device in your hand. When the person you’re calling answers, you feel a little vibration. Then you can hold the phone to your ear and start talking right away. Absolutely genius!
- Finding that mute button when an incoming call happens at the wrong time can be pretty difficult and annoying depending on what you’re being interrupted of. The Touch Diamond has implemented a great feature where you can just flip the phone over and place it face down in order to ignore and silence an incoming call. You don’t have to look at it, you don’t have to feel for some button on the phone. Just flip it over! (If you leave it flipped over, incoming calls will still sound, so just flip it up and down to silence it in that case) Throwing it across the room may also work, but I haven’t tried it.
- The stylus is held in by a magnet and snaps into place. Not only that, but when you remove the stylus, the Touch Diamond wakes itself up from Standby mode and becomes instantly ready for you to interact with.
- The Touch Diamond finally brought back the ambient light sensor. Back in 2000, if you had an iPAQ H3600 (also made by HTC), you remember how it would change the screen brightness depending on how bright your environment was. The Touch Diamond brings this great feature back, and makes for a nicely usable screen even in outdoors sunlight.
- There are little LED lights inside the circular part of the action button. They’ll glow and flicker in different patterns to indicate different status states. A slow glow from top to bottom indicates a charging status, while a rapid flicker indicates an alert or announcement.
- UPDATE: Touch sensitive hardware buttons. When you touch the action button with your finger while using the camera, this will activate auto-focus. Then you press the button all the way to take a picture. (Thanks Action Jackson) Also rubbing the circular area around the action button in a clockwise or counterclockwise motion will zoom in or zoom out in the Photo Album and Opera browser. It will also change the text font sizes in email messages and text messages.
And one more bonus feature that isn’t exactly a secret: the Touch Diamond is absolutely gorgeous. I can’t stop looking at it. It must be the most beautiful, smallest, lightest, thinnest Windows Mobile Pro device I’ve ever seen.
Want more Diamond? Check out our complete coverage…
HTC Touch Diamond Review
Opera 9.5 & YouTube on the Touch Diamond
Accelerometer Features on the Touch Diamond
The Touch Diamond’s Boot Up Video
Touch FLO 3D’s Slight Redesign
Touch Diamond’s TouchFLO 3D Usability
Device Mapping Remote Desktop on the Touch Diamond
HTC Touch Diamond in The House
Originally published on Pocketnow on June 11, 2008. More Thought articles from the Pocketnow archive.