HTC Touch Diamond, Pro (Raphael)...an evolution

Most of you who are following the windows mobile arena would have heard by now about HTC's new line of Phones. HTC has come a long way in mobile technology and has really improved their phones year on year. Though like any other company they had their own share of problems(HTC TyNT II Driver issue) but I'm glad to say they have finally figured out how to resolve them. This why I'm so excited about their new line of phones specially HTC Touch Pro aka Raphael. HTC recently launched Touch Diamond a lower variant of Touch Pro. This phone has really got rave reviews with some shortcomings but I guess this is a step in the right direction. HTC have done a good job and hopefully this keeps on getting better. Right now Touch Diamond is as close as it gets to iPhone from windows mobile perspective. It is feature packed with couple of innovations(borrowed from iPhone) but nevertheless it does the job well.

I don't plan to buy Touch Diamond as I'm waiting for HTC Touch Pro, but not sure if I can buy it specially the kind of price its being quoted for which is around $1000. I still have my old O2 XDA mini running smoothly so can't seem to justify buying a new phone yet.

HTC Touch Diamond
HTC Touch Diamond is a great device and initially had issues with lack of support for GSM 850Hz(mostly used by AT&T in US) and quite sluggish TouchFLO 3D response, but this has been fixed by release of new Hong Kong ROM by HTC. So it seems as far as the supported frequencies goes the hardware always supported it but initial ROM's released by HTC did not. One of the reasons may be since it has not been released for US market yet.

HTC Touch Pro is a beautiful and powerful device which I haven't seen in a long time. It looks like a great phone but I guess once it is released in first week of August we will really know its shortcoming.Since I believe there won't be much difference in the software of Diamond and Touch Pro so most of the performance related issues might still exist like sluggish performance that has been reported for Diamond but has been fixed to quite a extent by new ROM releases. Reviews have also pointed out Camera quality issues specially for video.

Pro's

1. Accelerometer
2. Great Design
3. Good Custom Interface(TouchFLO 3D)
4. VGA Screen (480 X 640)
5. Magnetic Stylus
6. aGPS

Con's

1. Lack of Expandable Memory
2. Performance Issues
3. Battery life(Now HTC is giving a higher capacity battery 1350mAh)
4. Expensive
5. Lack of good browser(Opera9.5 is still in beta )
6. Camera (Common problem in most mobile phones)

HTC Touch Pro(Raphael)

I love gadgets specially Pocket PC's as I've been fascinated by such raw power packed in these smaller devices and also its user experience similar to Windows. There are plenty of applications available(around 20,000 I believe) which completely transforms the user experience on these devices.
I like HTC Touch Pro as it seems to overcome couple of Touch Diamond's shortcoming like Expandable memory, Qwerty Keyboard, TV-Out. As of now there are no software demos of Touch Pro as it seem HTC has something up in its sleeves as most of the reviews just show hardware. So this is creating more excitement, but I don't think there is much difference compared to Diamond.

Devices are being designed to appeal to wide variety of users like business, entertainment hungry, gadget geeks. It also matters how software running these power houses are designed to make it easy for an average Joe to easily operate these devices. I think Apple has done a great job out there which other's are trying to do as well but it will take some time to get there. As a consumer it's win-win situation because companies are not just sitting over and creating devices but now they are paying attention to the User Interface as well. HTC Touch Diamond and Pro are great beginnings in that direction which I say is "Start Of An Evolution". Here are some of the specifications and Pros/Cons of Touch Pro.

Pro's

1. Accelerometer
2. Expandable Memory
3. Great Design
4. Good Custom Interface(TouchFLO 3D)
5. VGA Screen (480 X 640)
6. Qwerty Keyboard
7. TV-Out
8. Magnetic Stylus
9. aGPS

Con's

1. Performance Issues? (Needs to be seen)
2. Battery life? (Needs to be seen)
3. Expensive
4. Lack of good browser(Opera9.5 is still in beta )
5. Camera (Common problem in most mobile phones)

There are few other good devices which will be out soon(Oct/Nov 2008) like Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and offer good competition to HTC's Touch series, so 2008 Q4 should be lot of fun.

Specifications(pdadb.net): Touch Diamond, Touch Pro(Raphael)

Videos
Guys at phonearena have posted great review of HTC Touch Diamond. Also Phonemag has got hardware review of HTC Touch pro. Here are some videos.

This one is pretty nice. These people nearly broke the HTC Diamond..great device