last100 » HTC

More social networking impressions of the HTC Hero [review]

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:10:59 +0000

Way back when I reviewed HTC’s Windows Mobile-powered “Touch Diamond” smartphone, I gave props to the handset maker for trying to put a consumer and ‘finger-friendly’ face on Microsoft’s aging mobile OS, but ultimately concluded that the effort was in vein. Instead, I urged HTC build an OS of its own or more realistically, adapt the then up and coming Google Android platform to reflect the company’s own User Interface and UX ambitions. Enter the HTC Hero.

While HTC’s first two Android phones were standard ‘out-of-the-box’ affairs on the software side, the latest effort – the HTC Hero – features a near-complete UI overhaul called the HTC Sense that not only gives Android some much needed polish (Google isn’t exactly known for eye candy in its User Interfaces) but also puts social networking at its heart. The latter isn’t surprising considering that social networking is currently seen as the “killer” app for mobile and is helping drive up smartphone sales and mobile data usage, therefore loved by handset makers and carriers alike.

Having lived with the Hero for over a week, it’s easily the most social networking savvy smartphone I’ve tested, going far deeper than the efforts of most, if not all, of its competitors (I’m still waiting to do a full review of the Palm Pre). For example, while the iPhone has by far the best standalone Facebook app – the Hero sometimes even defers to the web-based mobile version – it’s just that. Standalone. Whereas the Hero takes a people centric approach, peppering a little Facebook integration here and there where most appropriate.

A widget on the home screen with favorite contacts for speed dialing indicates which of those contacts has a new Facebook status update, along with displaying their avatar from the social networking site.

Open up the Hero’s full address book and the avatars taken from Facebook, LinkedIn or Gmail are on show for each contact.

Click on a contact and scroll horizontally across the lower menu bar and you’ll once again find their latest status update as well as any ‘events’, such as a birthday, all pulled in from Facebook.

There’s also a tab for photos from two popular photo sharing sites – Flickr and Facebook – belonging to the accounts of said contact.

Again, rather than relying on separate apps for each social networking service, the content is arguably displayed where it should: with the person with whom it’s associated with.

Not only is the people-centric approach to integrating social networking sites a very practical way of keeping up with friends’ content, it’s also really fun as their is an element of surprise and added context.

The obvious example is that you’re about to call or text a friend, you pull up their contact details and notice they’ve uploaded new photos and updated their status. You’re then more likely to work that into the conversation. Alternatively, you notice a different contact has updated their status and so you decide to give them a call.

And so on.

There is, however, a downside to the idea of converging contact info and content from various social networking services into a unified ’social address book’, a la INQ, Palm’s WebOS etc. To get it working really well requires quite a bit of intervention. While the Hero tries to guess which contacts should be merged, it doesn’t always get it right and for quite a few contacts I had to manually link them from one service to another or delete duplicates. That’s not such a big deal – you only need to do this once for each contact – but it also has a less obvious effect.

Lock-in.

That’s probably music to HTC’s ears. Since their isn’t a standard protocol for linking social networking contacts into one converged social address book, if you move to a different device or more likely one from a different handset maker, you’ll have to start over. It’s taken me quite a few days to get the Hero fully working with, not against my social networking accounts and I’m really liking the result. Moving to a different platform – if the Hero was my primary smartphone (hey, I jump devices all the time) – would now be that bit less attractive.

Of course, HTC isn’t the only handset maker who may benefit from this. Motorola’s MotoBlur is attempting something similar, the same with Vodafone’s just announced 360, along with INQ and Palm.

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First impressions of the HTC Hero (widgets, web browser, and social networking)

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:02:03 +0000

Yesterday I wrote a rant about a few of Android’s shortcomings but my faith in the Google-led OS has already been somewhat restored (not that it had waned completely). A few minutes after hitting publish, a helpful courier dropped off a review loan of the HTC Hero, courtesy of mobile carrier Orange. The Hero is the first Android-powered device to be heavily customized in terms of User Interface, with HTC’s Sense UI, something that we’re going to increasingly see handset makers do. Just last week, Motorola unveiled its own social networking-driven take on Android, and INQ, makers of the so-called ‘Facebook’ phone, have revealed plans to do the same.

But back to the Hero. A few notable improvements over the standard ‘out-of-the-box’ Android include…

Much better looking and more useful widgets

The widgets that HTC have developed have a familiar look to anyone who has ever used the company’s Touch Flo layer on its Windows Mobile devices, especially the weather and clock widgets. Graphically, they look really polished but there is also some genuinely useful functionality too. I particularly like the Twitter widget (and included app) that allows for updates to be viewed and published from one of the Hero’s revolving home screens. Other nice touches include quick toggle on-screen switches for WiFi and Bluetooth, and speed dial favorites that feature avatars pulled from Facebook, Gmail or your own locally stored contact photos.

An improved web browser with iPhone-esque pinch to zoom

I hadn’t picked up on this from the various reviews that I’ve read but the web browser in the HTC Hero has the same multi-touch gestures for zooming in and out of a page as the iPhone. An inverted pinch zooms in, while a pinching gesture zooms the page out. Best of all, a double tap on an area of text zooms right in and columns are re-flowed almost instantly to eliminate any horizontal scrolling (see video above). Again, just like the iPhone.

Social networking integration (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Google)

One of the most fun aspects of the Hero is the level of integration with third-party web services. When you first set up the phone it not only asks you for your Google account credentials so that it can set-up the Gmail client, pull in contacts and sync with Google Calendar (presuming you use all of these Google services) but it will also, optionally, ask you for your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr account details.

Facebook friends are then added to your address book and their latest status updates from the social networking site, where available, are then displayed in each contact field. (The Hero attempts to converge contacts across more than one service, with mixed success.) The Twitter widget is also ready to go, and any photos taken can be uploaded to Facebook or Flickr. The result is that the Hero is no less a Google Phone as it is a Facebook Phone or Twitter Phone, and so on.

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Google vs Microsoft? Forget Chrome OS (for now) and keep your eye on Android and Win Mobile

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:57:29 +0000

Forget Chrome OS versus Windows (for now), there’s another Google / Microsoft battle taking place right in front of our eyes and Google’s winning. No, I’m not talking search. That war is over and Google was victorious a long time ago. I’m talking mobile. Android versus Windows Mobile to be precise, where Redmond is looking a little vulnerable to say the least.

Tech pundits like to talk endlessly about how Apple’s iPhone has shaken up the industry and that’s undeniable. But Android is a slow burner — don’t get fooled by the pig of a phone that was the T-Mobile G1 — the Google-led mobile OS is only now beginning to show its true potential. It’s not that consumers are flocking to Andriod — yet — it’s that handset makers right across the board are. And prior to Android, many of those handset makers were more than willing participants in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile eco-system. Less so now.

It’s been reported that HTC, the biggest manufacturer of Win Mobile devices, will by end of 2009 have moved 30% of its device lineup to Android, and by 2010 around half of new handsets released by the company will be powered by the Google-led OS. Part of the reason is that Android is free to license unlike Windows Mobile in which Microsoft gets a kick back for every phone sold. And part of the reason is the flexibility of the OS itself.

When I reviewed the HTC Touch Diamond, a flagship device at the time, I gave props to the company’s attempt at putting a more friendly consumer-oriented User Interface on top of the dated Windows Mobile but noted the limitations of this approach. Instead, I suggested that HTC would be better off looking for a new OS partner or building one of their own. Android was my recommended solution.

Almost a year on and it seems that the Google-led OS does indeed address the needs of HTC: A solid and free foundation on which the company can build on top to differentiate itself from the rest of the market through software and the User Experience.

Here’s what Horace Luke, the Chief Innovative Officer at HTC, told T3 upon unveiling the HTC Hero, its most customized Android device to date:

Android is very flexible. Windows Mobile was great with development tools, it can do lots of powerful things. But Android allows you to make changes from the top to the bottom layer.

There are three classes of Android phone: the first was the Google-branded phones, the G1 and Magic; the Hero is the first in the second category, in which we added our own customised UI, but we didn’t change everything because they did some great things, like push email, integrating Google Maps etc; and the third is the quick and dirty Chinese knockoffs that won’t work with Marketplace. They’re Linux phones, really…

The hardware is only a small part of the user experience, the UI brings it alive.

And it’s not just HTC that is seeing the potential of building a custom user interface on top of Android’s strong ‘out of the box’ foundations. Sony Ericsson is set to bring an Andriod-powered device to market under its previously Windows Mobile ‘Xperia’ brand, custom UI and all.

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Palm Pre to launch on O2 in the UK, just don’t mention the competition

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:45:34 +0000

It’s now official: The Palm Pre will launch exclusively on Telefonica-owned O2 here in the UK.

When?

“In time for the holidays”, say Palm and O2, with no word yet on pricing. My guess is that we’re talking early October, enough time to ramp up for Christmas spending.

Either way, it’s a pretty long time to wait, especially since O2 will have been busy pimping its other flagship exclusive. Apple’s newly launched iPhone 3GS.

And then there’s the rest of the competition.

Handsets already on the market in the UK that will/are to varying degrees going head-to-head with the Pre and iPhone include Nokia’s N97 (see my review), which is already getting its own TV and other advertising blitz, Vodafone’s Android debut, the HTC Magic (reviewed here), and Samsung’s HD video capable touch screen monster, the i8910 HD.

But perhaps more significant are the growing number of handsets, announced or known to exist, that will debut closer to the Palm Pre’s UK release.

First out of the gate is HTC’s newest Android phone, the Hero, with its Palm Pre-esque custom User Interface. We also know of Samsung’s Android-powered I7500 (another O2 offering), Sony Ericsson’s Satio (previously known as Idou), another touch screen device but one with a headline grabbing 12 megapixel camera. There’s also the expected BlackBerry Storm 2, Sony Ericsson’s own Android debut, and likely another flagship from Nokia.

That’s one crowded smartphone market, and knowing the competitive nature of the mobile phone space here in the UK, most, if not all of these Palm Pre competitors will come highly subsidized (or made to look that way), with pricing closer to “free” with a 18-24 month contract.

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Review: HTC Magic (Google Ion, T-Mobile myTouch 3G)

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:24:08 +0000

It goes by many names. The HTC Magic on Vodafone here in the UK, Google Ion, when handed out as a freebie at the search giant’s developer conference, and the myTouch 3G on T-Mobile in the states. But, whichever way you slice it, the second Android-powered Google phone, manufactured by HTC, is an improvement over the original T-Mobile G1 in almost every way.

Where the original G1 is clunky, in part due to its death-trap of a slide-out keyboard – OK I exaggerate but only slightly – the HTC Magic is relatively slim with subtle curves and a much reduced “chin”, which is a universal complaint of the G1.

Of course, without a physical keyboard, the Magic has to compromise with an on-screen QWERTY – more on that below – but doesn’t do away with hardware keys altogether. There’s call start and end, as well as ‘home’, ’search’ (it is a “with Google” phone after all) and dedicated ‘menu’ and ‘back’ buttons. These, particularly the latter two, when combined with the clickable BlackBerry-style scroll ball means that, for the most part, the Magic can be operated one-handed. This is something that I struggle with on the iPhone and many other touch-screen only devices, and the slightly narrower width of the phone – due to its smaller 3.2 inch screen – also makes it more comfortable to hold in one hand and that bit more pocketable, although, admittedly, this is very subjective.

On the Magic’s touch screen itself, it’s a joy to use. Like the iPhone, it’s capacitive rather resistive, responding to the natural electrical charges emitted by a finger rather than using pressure to register a touch. It’s bright with vibrant colors and, despite being smaller, the screen resolution also matches the iPhone’s 480 x 320. One thing I noticed, however, is that the touchscreen doesn’t seem quite as responsive near the edges. Finger smudges also quickly become an issue but this is common with all touch screen (and even some non-touch screen) models.

A few immediate complaints hardware-wise: The 3.2 megapixel camera is very average – and that’s being generous – and HTC’s insistence on omitting a standard 3.5 inch headphone jack in place of its all-in-one USB port used for headphones, charging and data transfer, makes a mockery of the phone’s media playback ambitions (the included buds are lousy). There’s also very little on-board storage, and although Vodafone’s Magic offering does come with a 2GB microSD card, it wasn’t long before I replaced it with an 8GB one.

On the software-side, and this is increasingly the battleground for today’s smartphones-come-mini computers, the HTC Magic uses the latest “Cupcake” 1.5 version of Android, which introduces a number of UI improvements, new features (such as video recording) and of course that virtual keyboard.

Talking of which, it’s pretty good as far as on-screen keyboards go (I’m not generally a fan). The auto-suggestion feature works well, offering a number of suitable choices in a strip just above and haptic feedback (a slight vibration) can be optionally turned on. When the phone is in portrait mode the keyboard is pretty cramped, switching over to landscape naturally works a lot better.

As you’d expect from a part Google branded phone, integration with the search giant’s own PIM apps is seamless. Just enter your Gmail credentials, and email, calendar and contacts are synced over-the-air, including their avatars, which show up in the Magic’s address book and caller ID. It works just like Apple’s MobileMe but without the cost. Updates can be constantly pushed to the phone in the background or can be toggled on or off on a per-application basis.

There’s also a very robust and feature-rich version of Google Maps, including street view and the location-aware social network Latitude. Using the phone’s built-in compass you can also operate street view as if you are there, which is fun if a bit gimmicky.

Photos taken with the phone’s camera can be uploaded to Picasa and videos shot, to YouTube. There’s also a native client for the video sharing site, with the option to view in low or high quality. The former is designed to conserve bandwidth when on 3G, the latter more suited to WiFi. All very nice, all very Google.

Third-party apps are a bit of mixed bag. There’s tons of potential and the Android Market, Google’s own app store, is really easy to use and has certainly filled up since I first looked at the G1. Having said that, I challenged my iPhone touting friend to pick 10 of his most used third-party iPhone apps and I’d try and find an equivalent on the Magic. For the most part I succeeded – streaming radio, podcast client, Twitter, London Underground status, cinema times etc. – but the iPhone choices are many and a great deal more polished.

This reflects not only the success of Apple in attracting developers to the iPhone but also perhaps the different approaches the developer tools take themselves. Apple, I’m told, provides a lot more out-of-the-box help with UI / look and feel than Android does.

A few areas where the Magic definitely trumps the iPhone: The app store (Android Market) feels more open, so for example, there’s a BitTorrent remote control app that has the same functionality that got a similar app banned from the iPhone App Store. You can also bypass the store altogether and download apps from anywhere on the web if you’re willing to ignore the security warnings.

The Magic, when plugged into a computer can be put into USB mass storage mode so that the phone shows up as a USB hard drive for easy transfer both ways of music, photos, video or any other file type. In other words, you don’t need to be tethered to iTunes. Media playback is pretty much on-par with the iPhone in terms of file format support – sans DRM – and any MP4 video file I threw at it that had been formatted for iPhone/iPod just worked.

Sadly, though, you can’t transfer files via Bluetooth to a PC or other phone, one sign of Android’s immaturity as a mobile OS.

Multi-tasking and background notifications is another area were the Magic performs well, and prior to iPhone OS 3.0, definitely beats Cupertino’s best efforts. However, I’m not sure this is the case anymore. Although the iPhone’s ‘push’ solution is still a bit of a fudge for managing multitasking and notifications, judging by the Magic’s limited battery life – if background syncing is on for Google apps and third-party goodness, let alone home screen widgets that pull in data from the web – Apple could be right in limiting the way the iPhone handles its always-on connectivity.

I also think Android’s notification system is kind of inefficient. An icon appears at the top of the screen to indicate a new email, for example, but you still need to drag that draw open to view the first line and click on it to launch the phone’s Gmail app where you’re taken not to the full email message itself but to the in-box. Worse still, the Magic’s home screen doesn’t show the most recent emails either, even though there are numerous home screen widgets for almost everything else (weather, twitter etc.)

I’ve purposely left the best to last. The Magic’s Android web browser is closest to iPhone’s yet, although I haven’t tried the Palm Pre, which also gets favorable comparisons. Admittedly, there’s no multi-touch (pinch to zoom) or double tapping but the on-screen zoom in and out controls that appear when you move around the page work fine. You can also copy and paste links, save images, open multiple windows but, frankly, its the speed and quality of rendering and the fluidity when scrolling or moving around the page that impresses most.

Again, like the iPhone, Flash isn’t supported, although the included YouTube client and other available third-party video apps (StumbleUpon, iPlayer etc.) go someway in making up for this.

Bottom line: if you want a phone to surf the web on and can’t afford the expense of an iPhone, or are already overly reliant on Google apps (that’s me by the way), you won’t be disappointed with the HTC Magic.

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HTC unveils Android-powered Hero, apes Palm Pre’s Synergy

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:22:04 +0000

I knew it would happen, I’m just surprised it’s taken so long: Google’s Android has been given a major UI overhaul by a third-party handset maker.

At a press conference in London this morning, HTC unveiled it latest Android-based phone – dubbed “Hero” – but unlike the G1 and HTC Magic before it, the new handset has been given a major UI overhaul that the company is calling HTC Sense.

Like the “Synergy” feature of Palm’s WebOS, social networking – Facebook, Twitter etc. – is integrated at the heart of the phone in a people not service-centric way. View a contact on the phone’s address book and you’re presented not only with their contact details and latest text messages but also status updates from Facebook and their most recently published photos on various photo sharing sites.

HTC Hero's "HTC Sense" UI

And like Gmail, the Hero’s email client presents emails as threaded conversations.

Another example of deeper web-service integration is the phone’s photo gallery app that not only accesses pictures taken by and stored locally on the device but can also pull in images from third-party photo sharing sites.

Search also borrows a little from the iPhone’s and Palm Pre’s “Universal” approach, not only searching data on the phone itself but also Twitter and, presumably, Google or one of its competitors.

Predictably, home screen widgets also feature heavily. And once again, these can pull in local data – latest SMS messages, world clock etc. – or that from third-party web services, such as the latest status updates, weather etc. The best comparison in this area is Nokia’s newly released N97.

All in all, it not only looks like HTC have put their own stylistic stamp on the standard Android UI but that HTC Sense, debuting on the Hero, takes and builds on top of the best of recent innovations from Apple, Palm and Nokia.

How well this works in everyday use, we don’t yet know. With the Hero set to go on sale in Europe sometime next month, hopefully I’ll get my hands on a review unit soon.

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MWC: Five handsets that caught my eye

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:00:32 +0000

This week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona has seen a flurry of handset announcements boasting, amongst other features, more megapixels, support for HD video, OLED screens and touchscreen UIs. Here’s five handsets that caught my eye.

Samsung Omnia HD

Not content with competing on megapixels alone, the Omnia HD, as the name suggests, is the first smartphone to both record and playback High Definition video. And that’s proper High Def (720p) unlike the slightly misleadingly named Touch HD from HTC. However, there’s much, much more to like about the Omnia HD, not least its 3.7″ AM OLED touch screen, which if the screen on Nokia’s N85 is anything to go by (I have one on loan right now), will be absolutely stunning. The device also has full DLNA certification, meaning that it’s possible to share media shot or stored on the handset with other UPnP AV devices, such as a PlayStation 3 connected to a High Definition TV.

OS-wise, the Omnia HD uses the latest Symbian OS and the touch-friendly version of S60, although Samsung have customized the home screen quite a bit, including various widgets as first seen on the Tocco.

Nokia N86

The successor to the N85, Nokia’s N86 bumps up the phone’s camera specs to 8 megapixels and features a wide-angle Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, with claims to SLR-like quality. There’s the usual N-series goodness too, such as access to all of Nokia’s Ovi web services (share on Ovi, Nokia Maps, Nokia Music Store, Contacts), along with support for the company’s N-Gage gaming platform, including dedicated gaming keys. As well as being a general upgrade from the N85 – utilizing the same 2.6 inch AM OLED screen – a welcome addition is the kick stand, a feature borrowed from the flagship N96 (see my BBC iPlayer on N96 review).

HTC Touch Diamond 2

With the successor to the Touch Diamond (see our review), HTC’s Touch Diamond 2 continues in its attempt to put a finger-friendly UI on top of the aging Windows Mobile 6.1. This time round, however, HTC claims that its TouchFlo 3D UI goes a little deeper and that users should be able reach a lot more of the phone’s software features before being dropped into the standard and non-finger friendly Windows Mobile. To assist in its finger-friendly-ness, the size of the touch screen has been increased from 2.8 to 3.2 inches with WVGA (480 X 800 pixel) resolution. A neat looking feature is the new ‘zoom bar’, a touch sensitive area below the screen that can be swiped in order to zoom in and out of web pages and other documents, similar to the Palm Pre’s gesture bar. Additionally, the camera has been upgraded to 5 megapixels.

HTC Magic

Another new device from HTC, this time the Magic runs the Google-led Android OS and is the second phone of its kind following the G1. The HTC Magic differs from the G1 in a number of ways, most notably ditching the slide out keyboard for an onscreen virtual QWERTY a la iPhone. T-Mobile has been replaced in favor of Vodafone as the time-limited exclusive carrier, and the phone’s camera software has been upgraded to include video recording capability. The HTC Magic is also a lot thinner than the G1 and overall looks quite stylish in comparison.

Sony Ericsson Idou

Even though this one wreaks of vaporware – even the Idou name isn’t final – Sony Ericsson’s latest handset announcement has some headline grabbing specs.

First up is the phone’s 12.1 megapixel camera. And while megapixels alone don’t guarantee good photos, it carries the Cybershot branding, so it’s likely to be decent enough. The Idou is another touchscreen affair — see the trend? — and when finished will utlize the new open source version of Symbian. From the looks of things, Sony Ericsson have put their own eye candy (and there’s plenty of it) on top of Symbian/S60, and from early hands-on videos the UI is both pretty and responsive. Hardware-wise, the handset is unsurprisingly thin, as you’d expect from a flagship SE device.

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Review: HTC Touch Diamond

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:08:04 +0000

It’s hard not to look at HTC’s new flagship smartphone, the Touch Diamond, through iPhone-tinted glasses. Featuring a touch screen interface that’s been designed, on the surface at least, to be operated using a finger rather than a stylus, like Cupertino’s own crown jewel, the Touch Diamond is marketed as a device that makes accessing the Web on the go just as easy as making a phone call. It’s also HTC’s latest attempt to put a consumer face on the business oriented Windows Mobile operating system. No mean feat in itself.

Read on to find out if the HTC Touch Diamond truly sparkles or if it’s just an expensive piece of “bling” (Ed. enough puns already).

Hardware design

The first thing you notice about the Touch Diamond is that despite being a touch screen device, the phone is both candy bar in shape and size. In this respect the hardware design leans more towards something from Sony Ericsson rather than Apple’s iPhone. Having said that, the Touch Diamond remains minimalistic in design. The 2.8-inch touch screen takes up most of the surface aside from four dedicated buttons (home, back, answer call, end call), along with an iPod-like virtual scroll wheel that also acts as a directional pad.

On top of the device is an on/off button and down the left hand side are volume controls. Tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner is a stylus, held in by a magnet. This might seem like a design flaw on paper but in practice it actually works really well. As you begin to slide the stylus back in it reaches a magnetic tipping point and automatically snaps into place.

At the bottom of the Touch Diamond is the dreaded all-in-one Mini USB port, which, as with other HTC phones, is used for charging, syncing, USB drive mode and for connecting the supplied headset. The obvious downside to this approach is that you’ll need to purchase a third-party adapter if you want to use your own headphones.

The Touch diamond offers two cameras: one front mounted for video calls over 3G, and an auto-focus 3.2 megapixel camera for taking pictures and shooting VGA quality video.

The phone also features an accelerometer which is employed in a number of applications, mostly notably to change the screen orientation when browsing the Web. Another nice use is that you can switch to ’silent’ mode by turning the phone face down.

Overall, the Touch Diamond feels comfortable in the hand and looks pretty slick, even if it is a bit of a finger print magnet. The only contentious part of the hardware design is the diamond embossed back cover which isn’t to everyone’s taste. In fact, HTC are reportedly supplying a re-branded version of the Diamond to a number of carriers without the jagged rear casing.

Connectivity, storage and battery

The Touch Diamond features all manner of connectivity including Wi-Fi, HSDPA, along with assisted GPS. We found call quality and reception to be excellent, although the speaker phone was a bit on the quiet side. On the storage front, you’re limited to the built-in 4GB of solid state memory, which, similar to the iPhone, can’t be upgraded via a memory card. In terms of juice, the Touch Diamond has a 900mAh battery, which is on the small side. In our testing the phone ran for a full day with moderate use of Wi-Fi and 3G data etc., but not much longer.

User Interface: TouchFLO 3D

The idea behind HTC’s newly designed User Interface, TouchFLO 3D, is to transform Windows Mobile into something that is both eye catching and – crucially – something that can be operated with a finger. In other words, you shouldn’t need to take out the stylus to access the phone’s main applications. That’s the idea anyway.

At the bottom of the screen are ten icons: Home, People, Messages, Mail, Internet, Photos and Videos, Music, Weather, Settings, and Applications, which you can scroll through by swiping your finger horizontally back and forth. Upon selecting an icon, it’s corresponding application screen is then launched, all keeping within the Touch Diamond’s finger-friendly UI. Contacts in your address book, for example, can be browsed with a flick of the finger, cover flow-style, or by tapping the virtual up and down buttons. Likewise, when in the Photos and Video screen, thumbnails are presented one at a time ready to be flicked through, as is album art in the Music screen and so forth.

While HTC have achived the first goal – TouchFLO 3D looks fantastic – the UI falls short in two crucial areas: It doesn’t scale very well, and can at times feel rather unresponsive. For example, try loading the phone up with over a hundred contacts, and then flick all the way to “Z”. To tackle this problem, TouchFLO 3D offers to drop you into list view and, disappointingly, right back into the standard Windows Mobile interface, which is of course designed to be used with a stylus!

Even if we ignore the fact that HTC’s finger friendly UI is only skin deep, its less than snappy performance is a lot harder to forgive. We’re not sure it’s the hardware that can’t keep up with TouchFLO’s 3D effect or if it’s the Diamond’s “resistive” touch screen, designed for both finger and stylus input, that makes it lag a little. Our guess is it’s probably a bit of both.

Additional software: Weather, YouTube and Opera Mobile 9.5

Aside from the usual Windows Mobile applications such as Office Mobile, Windows Media Player and Windows Live Messenger, HTC have bundled a number on non-Microsoft applications that deserve a separate mention.

First up is HTC’s own Weather app, which appears as one of the ten icons featured when in TouchFLO 3D mode. This app is similar to widgets like the ones you find on the iPhone or Google Gadgets on a PC. In this case, weather conditions are beautifully animated and can be preset to display local conditions city by city.

While Microsoft’s Pocket Internet Explorer is included as an option, HTC have made the smart decision to offer the latest version of Opera Mobile as the default Web browser. Features such as support for modern Web standards, tap to zoom, and re-formatting of text to eliminate horizontal scrolling, all create a very pleasant surfing experience, limited only by the Diamond’s smallish screen.

Similar to the iPhone, HTC have also created their own dedicated YouTube client, which although not quite as polished as Apple’s, works well enough. Another Google property is also supported out of the box with the bundled Windows Mobile version of Google Maps.

Verdict

Although there’s lots to like about the Touch Diamond, not least its stylish and thoughtful hardware design, and TouchFLO 3D’s good looks, it never quite escapes the fact that Windows Mobile is designed to be used with a stylus.

As much as HTC have attempted to customize Microsoft’s OS to make it finger friendly and more appealing to the consumer market, the resulting compromises suggest that HTC might be better off taking Apple’s all-in-one approach in which the company controls the complete user experience by designing both the hardware and software.

Alternatively, perhaps HTC needs to find a new OS partner (or hope that Windows Mobile 7 finally delivers), as there’s no doubt that they know how to do hardware.

Android anyone?

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HTC on schedule to deliver Android-powered phone in 4Q

Daniel Langendorf — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 04:07:11 +0000

Overheard at a Verizon wireless store today:

Kid: “This phone sucks.”

Dad: “I know. But there’s not much I can do about it.”

Kid: “Why?”

Dad: “Your contract isn’t up until March and I don’t want to pay $300 for a new one.”

Kid: “Your phone is eligible for an upgrade. Let me use yours.”

Dad: “I don’t want to buy any new phone right now. There’s going to be a lot of phones coming out in the next six months and I want to see them first. All the phones here are lame duck technology.”

Kid: “Oh. Well, this phone still sucks.”

At least some relief is on the horizon for dad. High Tech Computer (HTC), a Taiwan-based maker of Microsoft Windows Mobile cell phones, announced it is on schedule to deliver by 4Q 2008 its first phones based on Google’s open source mobile operating system, Android [via DigiTimes and IntoMobile]. No other details were provided.

HTC has long been rumored to be making their HTC Dream smartphone available on the Android platform later this year, making HTC the first manufacturer to deliver an actual working model and not a prototype with promise.

It is expected that an Android-powered Google phone — along with the introduction in July of the Apple iPhone 3G — will completely shake up the U.S. cell phone/smart phone market with its touch screen and haptic feedback, a full QWERTY keypad (that slides or swivels for easy typing and texting), and Internet access, among other features.

It’s enough for dad to hold off buying a new phone for the kid.

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HTC launches first true iPhone competitor just as Apple is about to take its phone to next level

Daniel Langendorf — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:02:20 +0000

It’s about time. Well, sort of.

Taiwanese smart phone manufacturer HTC launched the Touch Diamond today and, as expected, it’s small, sleek, sexy, very iPhone-esque, and promising.

Unfortunately for those of us in the U.S. or Latin America, the Diamond will not be available until the second half of 2008. If you’re in European markets, the phone begins shipping in June, followed by Asia and the Middle East.

As you know, much has been said about the iPhone since its launch last June. Ever since then, any phone released by any manufacturer is compared with the iPhone.

But so far, no one has come close to the iPhone’s design, interface, usability, user experience, and overall satisfaction, although Nokia’s offerings are popular. One “phone” promised to take on the iPhone, but the so-called Gphone, running Google’s mobile operating system Android, hasn’t been released by any manufacturer yet, it isn’t expected until the fourth quarter, and is completely untested in the market.

The Touch Diamond certainly has impressive specs — a 2.8-inch, 680×480 VGA display, quad-band, 3G, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, HSDPA support, a 3.2-megapixel camera, 4GB internal storage, 256MB flash memory, 192MB RAM, and SD external storage. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and a full Web browser in Opera. And, as previously stated, its darn attractive.

But without having one to play with, it’s impossible to say how the Touch Diamond stacks up to the iPhone experience. For sake of argument, let’s hope HTC’s new phone is compelling and scares the pants off Apple in the name of competition.

Chances of that happening, however, are slim as Apple is about to move into the next phase of the iPhone’s life — as evidenced by all the rumors of the coming 3G phone, expected to be announced in early June with availability following shortly thereafter.

If Apple has played its hand right, the iPhone is poised to enter 2.0-land far ahead of everybody else, especially with a 3G offering, enterprise support, and third-party applications coming soon. HTC, Nokia, Gphone makers, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and BlackBerry have yet to even hit with successful 1.0 products.

Apple also has a marketing and publicity advantage in the U.S., where Nokia is well known but doesn’t sell as many phones as it does worldwide. HTC has almost no name recognition, although it is slowly gaining in prominence.

While the HTC Touch Diamond appears to be a compelling product worthy of challenging the iPhone, we’ll have to wait and see it in action here in the States. And by then, iPhone 2.0 will be out. Will anybody even remember HTC?

Additional coverage: engadget, gizmodo, Cnet.

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