Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware tour of the much-anticipated HTC touch diamond2 now this particular unit is the European version there will be a US release of this device on AT&T and maybe t-mobile coming up later this year but right now it's gonna start in Europe you can use this on t-mobile and AT&T now but you won't get 3G data only edge but there's always Wi-Fi so let's take a look at this device let's start in the upper left corner here so up here we have the HTC logo right next to the status indicator light to the right of that is the light sensor to regulate screen brightness and to the right of that is the front-facing video camera now in the u.s. we can't use the front-facing video camera because no network supports video cause the screen is a 3.2 inch diagonal screen and to give you a basis of comparison the iPhone is a 3.5 inch screen the touch HD has a 3.8 inch screen which is quite large and then the old touch pro and the touch diamond have a 2.8 inch screen so it's kind of in the middle the resolution is 800 down and 480 across so that is WVGA that's the largest resolution supported by Windows Mobile so it has a really really crisp picture moving down we have this capacitive zoom slider and the zoom slider will allow you to zoom in and out whether you're in Google Maps or you're in a picture or on the in the in the web browser and it works quite well and we'll talk about that later in the review and in the next video now a little bit little note on the screen sensitivity the touch diamond2 has increased screen sensitivity probably as close to capacitive as you could possibly get with this type of touchscreen this is a resistive touchscreen all windows mobile devices have a resistive touchscreen so huge huge amount of points for the screen on the touch HD it's a joy to type on it's super sensitive and it's a really fantastic screen going down we have the call start button next to that windows flag and this is a required button to have on windows mobile 6.5 devices and this will be upgradeable to 6.5 what's that comes out but it ships with six point one we have a backer okay button and to the right of that is a call end button and they also have the little Home icon to tell you that when you hit this it will go back to the home screen now let's go over to the side here we have a very predominant volume rocker it's actually the same volume rocker that you find on the touch HD to the right of that it says HTC innovation on the bottom we have the ext USB port which will accept a mini USB we have the volume RCA or the microphone over here we have the stylus and it's actually not the magnetic stylus that's found on the touch HD but it does trigger the screen to turn on when you go when you pull off the stylus if you remember the touch HD and the touch pro and the touch of diamond you would bring it in close and it would suck it all the way in not the case with the the touch diamond2 unfortunately so you have to manually put it in on the other side of the device we have a speaker so that when you are listening to music you don't have to have the phone face down or face over it will play out the side so the speaker doesn't get cut up cut off on the top we have a standby button and that's it flipping over to the back they did away with the diamond faceting and replaced it with a fingerprint magnet black shiny coating which I'm not too big of a fan of and it also shows dirt very well but anyhow up here we have a five megapixel camera the same five megapixel camera that comes with the touch HD surrounded by a nice piece of brushed metal and we take off the back we expose the 1,100 milliamp hour battery and unfortunately they put the microSD slot behind the battery cover and we really don't like to see that it's better when it's out in the front of the device so you can easily swap in and swap out your memory cards so overall the hardware on the HTC touch diamond2 is quite fantastic it has great build quality as we've come to expect from HTC devices although this device misses a few things such as a flash on the camera I know the original diamond didn't have a flash but this is the next version and you'd think it would have that improvement also we're not really liking this black shiny coating on the back it makes it scratch very easily and prone to fingerprints also a d-pad would have been nice although the trend now for windows mobile devices is to have no d-pad to kind of clean up the front which is okay and also an external micro SD slot would have been preferred instead of having to fish under the battery to put that in but we're really excited about the improved screen sensitivity a lot of people complain that it's an on windows mobile devices you have to press really hard to activate things on the screen but on this particular device I think HTC has done some work with the screen to make it more finger friendly and require a lighter touch so coming up soon we'll have the software tour followed by the full review on pocketnow.com we'll be back soon with more