Gadgetory

hey guys it's brand a minimun from pocket now calm and this is the software tour of the new HTC touch diamond2 now there are a lot of things to talk about in terms of software changes we're going to talk about everything thoroughly in the upcoming review on pocketnow.com but for now we're just going to take you through the the most major changes to the new interface this is a new version of touchflo 3d and there are many changes to talk about so let's turn on the device and get closer to the screen so everything looks really fantastic on this WVGA screen so that's 800 pixels down and 480 across it's the same resolution as the Touch HD and it's in a smaller area so actually the screen looks a little bit more crisp on the diamond too than it does on the touch HD so let's start off with the time if you tap on the time you're taken into this nice little interface you can add a city to have multiple places with the time and we can also go to the next step here with alarm clock and this device is a really robust alarm clock application it's kind of like the iPhone so if we tap on any of these we can have a an alarm only for Monday Wednesday and Friday at you know 6 a.m. just a really elegant interface here for setting the alarm and let's go back something else that's changed is the notification area so if I tap up here at the top we have a notification area and if you have a new email or new SMS or missed a call it'll all show up here and then we can go into the Wi-Fi screen right from here which is much different it's much more elegant now I can see that I'm connected to GM 1 2 3 there's agreeing check shows the signal strength of all of the networks and of course you can flick your finger up to see your next appointments and there are none coming up here if we go to the next tab and I've rearranged these a little bit to suit my needs we have a few options here we can customize the tabs of course by moving them around and this isn't anything new we've seen this on previous versions of touchflo 3d we can edit our contact card I'll talk a little bit about that later and change your wallpaper your ringtones or we can jump into all settings which is the usual windows mobile interface that you're accustomed to the next ones email and you've seen this before this is present in all touchflo 3d versions I'm gonna skip the next tab and I'll come back to it here we have SMS and the next tab is something I definitely wanna talk about push internet this is new for the diamond too and the touch pro2 push internet will preload pages based on a set schedule so that lets say everyday 12 o'clock you check your email and so you can set this so that every day at 12 o'clock it will check your email so right now if pocketnow.com preloaded so if i tap on this watch how fast it comes up there it's almost instant because it's preloaded it says last update 58 minutes ago while I'm in this screen I'm going to talk about the the zoom slider so there is a capacitive zoom slider here which allows you to zoom in on the page if you slide your finger the zoom action is pretty smooth but one of the biggest problems is that it's imprecise so if you double tap anywhere on the screen you can choose exactly where you want to zoom in right it's like that in all versions of Opera Mobile but what if you want to zoom in right on the center right here on the center of the screen well if you use the zoom slider it's gonna zoom over to the left it's it's quite random and you'd think intuitively what would happen is you tap an area on the screen then zoom in and then the zoom would go to that area but that's not the case so I'm not sure about the utility of the zoom slider it would be nice if you could customize how it functioned so let's get out of that let me just take you through how you add a new push page so I'm gonna tap add a new push page and let's do the address let's do amazon.com and it wants a title is so Amazon okay and frequency of updating you can have every six hours what let me go back there every every one hours 3 hours 6 hours 12 hours or 24 hours so I'm gonna set that to 6 hours and save and you can also set whether this happens on the weekends cuz maybe you don't want to see a certain webpage on the weekend so you go down to menu and you go to schedule settings and here we can determine when this actually occurs so you may not want to to pull down the webpage when you're sleeping if you don't want it to use the data on your phone or use the battery okay moving along we go to the calendar tab and this is kind of new for HTC devices what's really neat about the calendar tab is that it also integrates weather so if I go to the 19th it will show me that on the 19th it's going to be raining if I go to the next day Monday it's going to be raining with 47 here in Philadelphia and so on and so forth it will go all the way out into Wednesday because it's a five-day forecast and of course we can zoom out and see our calendar again and we can go to the next month with a nice really nice animation that goes from month to month the next tab is stocks which has been read read done a little bit so if we tap on Apple it will show us the stock details and we can change the the graph to a longer time period out to two years if we go to photos and video you can of course flick through your pictures and if you tap on a picture it goes into landscape and then you can do a circle to zoom in or you can use the zoom bar and it zooms right to the center of the picture which is more intuitive than the way it works in Opera Mobile where it kind of zooms off into the left now to go to the next picture it's got a really interesting flick scrolling capability no longer is it just one action and everything automatically flicks you can actually go half way and hold it there it's it's more intuitive I think than previous versions of this photo gallery all right the next tab is music and you've seen this before you can flick through your your album art and play music right from the home screen the next tab is weather and this is the weather for the taller screen so you get the forecast right on the screen which is great and you can have multiple cities if you'd like so you can go to menu add location and let's go to Venezuela Barcelona and then it will download the weather data and then you can flick from screen to screen by going upward like that so now when you press the start button on the newer HTC devices you are taken to the HTC program launcher so you're no longer taken to the standard Windows Mobile Start menu you can actually turn this off if you disable touchflo 3d and it's quite nice you can add your favorite programs right now there's only a small amount of programs listed there but if you press add you are taken to the entire list of programs that are stored on the device so let's say we want to have word mobile and there it is word mobile now something that HTC has done is changed all the soft key menus to be more finger friendly so if we go into File Explorer you can see that there and we go to menu all of the secure all of the menus now our finger friendly and you can kind of Kairosoft through these this is reminiscent of windows mobile 6.5 actually the way that everything is much larger on the screen I'm surprised they didn't do this with previous versions of touchflo 3d devices because it's a really smart idea to make it easier to navigate with your finger now something that is new is this unified communication screen and the idea is that if you are on a call with this person you want to be able to see in one shot all the text messages you've had with them all the emails you've had with them all the calls you've had with them and also any other information about them such as where they live or their their cell phone number or their home number things like that and this is a great way to do that whenever you're on a call with someone you're taken into a screen that looks like this so right now I can see text messages that I've had with this person and this is the new text messaging screen by the way so I can go in here and I can type hi and it takes a minute to show up as it sends and there it is nice elegant looking way to to text message someone if I go over to the right I can see all the emails that I have had with this person and it will look into your outlook inbox so if you have emails from a year ago they're not going to show up here but if you have emails from you know however long your sync period is so I think mine here is set to 3 days which is why I have some from April 16th and April 15th now this is what happens when you call somebody and what happens is that there's this new slide down for more options screen I really don't understand why this is here probably because they don't want you to accidentally press the other buttons on the screen but you could end the call or open the keypad accidentally as well so it doesn't really make sense so if I bring it down I've access to those unified communication buttons so I can see any calls that I've had with this person or any text messages and of course this is a number to a administrative building somewhere so I haven't had any interaction with this phone number and of course to end the call you just tap and the call right there now something that we still don't have is Universal screen rotation so if we're in this screen and we rotate the device nothing happens we go into the Start menu and rotate the device nothing happens the only places where screen rotation happens is an opera mobile and in the photo gallery just as with other HTC devices we really wish that this functionality would finally come so the software on the HTC touch diamond2 is well done the incremental upgrades to touchflo 3d are much welcomed and we're really looking forward to the free windows mobile 6.5 upgrade that we'll get hopefully sometime soon and also the increased screen sensitivity makes using the device much easier and and comfortable because you don't have to press as hard and as you've seen in this whole video demonstration I didn't take out the stylus once because everything is just so well tuned for finger friendliness so if you want to touch diamond2 of your own be sure to check out clove cote UK and we're gonna have the full review coming up very soon on pocketnow.com be sure to check out the unboxing and hardware tour videos of the touch diamond2 in case you missed that we'll post links in the sidebar if you want to take a look at that that's it for now