Gadgetory

t see touch diamond let's get to it so the touch diamond was a very important phone not only for HTC and Verizon and the other carriers involved plus Microsoft to provided the software but for the entire smartphone industry in general the iPhone came out in June 2007 and with it brought a a kind of change in in the way people think about smart phones to touch friendly interfaces characterized by capacitive screens well Windows Mobile devices previously to the iPhone have been all driven by a stylus small interface elements that make it a little bit difficult to use your finger on the screen HTC comes in to the scene about a year after the iPhone started to hit store shelves and introduced touchflo 3d which really changed the way people used non-smart none I phone devices like Windows Mobile devices and really started to excel innovation in the smartphone area so before we talk about the software and touchflo 3d let's talk about the hardware of the touch diamond of course this is the verizon version as you can see here it had a two-point inch diagonal touchscreen VGA resolution if you calculate the pixel density it's 285 ppi which in today's age is still pretty good as some some context here the iPhone 4 has a ppi of 326 and certain other smartphones like the Atrix 4G are around the high 200s so to be already in the high 200s back in 2008 or 2009 when this particular verizon unit came out that was pretty good and in comparison to the iPhone of the day which still didn't have the Retina display this was a big jump the iPhone of of before the iPhone 4 the 3GS the 3G and the original iPhone had a PPI pixel density of about 165 so the screen looked a lot better here on the HTC touch diamond2 is resistive and you can always tell a resistive screen if you tilt it just right and you press on the screen you can see it sink in a little bit so resistive screens aren't very sensitive you have to put a little bit of pressure on them HTC tried their best to op the is the hardware where you can only push a resistive screen so far so let's talk about the other buttons here we have a lot of hardware buttons which is good because some of them are programmable home back a d-pad Center will select call start and call end a lot of people liked having those buttons available today the trend on the newest devices is for fewer buttons in fact a device like the Incredible S looks like it has no buttons when it's turned off when in fact it has four when you turn it on over here on the side we've got a volume rocker on the back we've got this really cool diamond faceting that's where the touch diamond name comes into play really picked up on a lot of finger prints this phone came out before the days when they started to use that soft touch plastic which which is a really nice way to to give a good texture to the back of the phone have a 3.2 megapixel camera with no flash kind of is outlined by an awesome little triangle popping off the back battery cover we have a 1400 or about 1300 milliamp hour battery here which is pretty big for that day a micro SD card slot and on the bottom you can see HTC's EXT USB this is their proprietary jack that they went away from shortly after the touch of diamond in favor of micro USB and then one day HTC came out and said we're going to have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on every phone from now on they've made good of that promise which is great because on these older devices like the touch diamond you would actually need an adapter to use headphones with this weird jack here going over to the side nothing there a power standby button on the top now inside we've got a Qualcomm 528 megahertz processor in comparison today we're seeing dual-core 1 gigahertz processors or Evis the Qualcomm Snapdragon single core 1 gigahertz processor so this was running at about half the clock or even a quarter of the clock of current devices of today it has 192 megabytes of RAM HTC's newest phones have 768 megabytes of RAM which is kind of crazy if you think about it your desktop computer of you know 2002-2004 might have had 512 megabytes of and these new HTC phones are actually coming out with more RAM than old desktop computers that's just how technology evolves and we've got 256 megabytes of ROM so not much to word you gotta get it you have to get a microSD card with this device if you want to store any media at all now we've got a really cool magnetic stylus here which will actually turn on the screen when you remove it so if I remove it that goes on and because it's magnetic when you get to the bottom here it sucks it in which was a really cool innovative feature back in 2008-2009 okay now let's talk about the actual software that is running here we've got windows mobile 6.1 so we're talking no app store no built in kinetic scrolling I mean things are a little bit rugged here in the HTC touch diamond2 just get ready for that so I'm going to zoom in and some of the time moment is a style is some of the time I'm going to use my finger there are still screen elements in this device that just do not work with your finger because they're so small so of course we have touchflo 3d here which is comprised of these little tabs along the bottom HD still HTC still uses this interface paradigm in HTC Sense the interfaces that they have on Evo and on the inspire 4G and the legend on all of their newer phones they brought this forth through throughout all of their products but they've just renamed it to cents the idea with cents is to bring information forward or in the case of touchflo 3d it brings information out of programs that you would typically have to dig to get to so for example instead of going to contacts you slide over to favorites you flip through your favorites instead of going to text messages you have the the panel here music makes it easy to flip through your different album art without having to dig into the the actual music application you get this really cool 3d view this was cool stuff for 2008-2009 and there is no landscape support in touch flow 3d although later they introduced it with the touch HD we've got email accounts we've got the web and we'll talk about the web browser here and how that is in a few minutes here if you've got photos and video and this was one of the coolest parts so you could flick through this beautiful visual display this was something you could really use to impress your friends the iPhone wasn't even doing really cool fancy graphic stuff like this it's a little bit choppy but it was quite nice and because the HTC touch diamond2 touchscreen meaning you can't do multi-touch HTC came up with this really innovative way to zoom you'd make a little circle around the area you wanted to zoom in on and boom it zooms pretty cool very innovative because this has a resistive touch screen you may find that as I move around here the phone's not going to respond because I'm very used to using a capacitive screen and I don't press very hard you don't have to these days on the touch diamond you got to give it a little bit of pressure so here we have your favorite applications of course you can add your own we've got weather with the beautiful weather animations which hdçç still uses on their newer devices we can flick through to see different locations and finally we end up on settings so let's dive into the Start menu as they called it back in windows mobile 6.1 this was still the old style Start menu where your recent programs were listed here on the top and then your other entries were down below what's interesting is that HTC's newer devices like the Desire HD puts recently used programs in the notification shade it's kind of funny to think that they brought forward a UI element that was present in old Windows Mobile just something that's interesting so here's an example of where you can't really use your finger you can but it's very difficult I'm going to try to land on programs and there we go now Windows Mobile didn't have kinetic scrolling built in until 6.5 this is six point one but HTC figured it out and this was a really big deal because previous to this device you had to grab these skinny scroll bars to move around but now you could use your finger making it a lot easier to get around the interface so let's talk about the built-in applications here on the HTC touch diamond2 a bubble breaker solitaire par for the course on Windows Mobile and then the introduced teeter which was really an awesome application to take advantage of the accelerometer and this was before Apple had its App Store we first saw this and we hadn't really seen many third-party games come to smart phones so the fact that HTC included this awesome accelerometer driven game was pretty amazing back in the day they still use this game teeter in their newer devices very popular device or very popular game will press okay there and we're back office mobile of course lets you view your OneNote at one mobile files PowerPoint and you could edit Word and Excel all this stuff is standard for Windows Mobile active sync of course people love that people hated it it's active sync adobe reader to look at pdfs album which HTC kind of spruced up a little bit with a touch flow-3d like interface you can use the d-pad to highlight pictures as you go along it took pretty good photos for a device of 2008-2009 audio booster calendar i mean that's sort of built-in stuff communications manager now this device actually came with opera mobile to make web browsing better because the built in browser Internet Explorer was horrible so here is the built-in browser I've already loaded the full version of Engadget it doesn't seem to be loading images here let's see if it is checked off but it's not showing up and there was no accelerometer support and Internet Explorer here and this is what it looks like to browse a web page you've got scroll bars and scroll bars and scroll bars and that's really it it's very cumbersome to use so it's no wonder that HTC and Verizon and everyone else decided to include Opera Mobile which is a far superior way to view web pages so here it is Opera Mobile really helped to extend the life of Windows Mobile and so did Skyfire by bringing actually a decent browsing experience to the table so let's try to go to a website and by the way here is the on-screen keyboard it's very small yet very usable HTC did a great job to optimize this just to give you an idea here is my finger it covers up about four letters quite a different story from the 4.3 inch displays of today so I'm going to go to pocketnow.com here and let's see what happens now this did have accelerometer support which is great after a while this device is not very responsive as you can see you know when when the Snapdragon processor came into the scene with some newer windows mobile phones and then the Android phones and the Windows Phone 7 devices different story that produced a huge leap in the ability of these phones to browse the web so here we're loading it seems to be a little bit slow but it's getting it done so here we have desktop class browsing on this older device to sort of bring it up to par with the iPhone it's not loading all the images for some reason of course we don't have multi-touch but we can double tap to zoom in maybe there we go and so browsing was ok I mean it worked pretty well here thanks to Opera Mobile and then there were many new versions of Opera Mobile that took advantage of server-side rendering and all that we also have a YouTube application and there's an example of where I didn't press hard enough to actually make the phone respond and it seems to be being a little pesky there we go ok so if we go into the Start menu we can go into the dedicated YouTube application here's the HTC task manager by the way so the iPhone got YouTube application and it was awesome to be able to bring around YouTube's library of millions of videos wherever you go and high quality was great so HTC got to work they made this application if we go up to settings we can change the quality and there it is it was very finger friendly it looked and felt a lot like the iPhone version whose head kinetic scrolling it looked great it was a really a revolution outside of iPhone to have this YouTube application come to the table for the touch diamond and later for the touch pro and all of the subsequent touch devices so again the touch diamond was a big innovation although it didn't have an app store didn't have a capacitive screen didn't have a super-fast processor in 2008-2009 it was actually a device that could go head-to-head with the iPhone HTC really innovated a lot with touchflo 3d to bring information out in front of you and best of all they made it beautiful something that Windows Mobile really lacked at the time and even other smartphone operating systems like blackberry and Symbian really lacked at the so they brought forth just a lot of innovation really holding to their their their slogan of HTC innovation which has since been changed to HTC quietly brilliant so a really cool device a blast from the past I hope you enjoyed this throwback video of the HTC touch diamond2 have a device that you want us to do a throwback with let us know and we'll try to get one and bring it in and do a throwback video for you thanks for watching and please give this video a thumbs up if you liked it that's it for now