PCPro review

[Guest Confucious]

Was looking through my copy of this months PCPro this morning and came across a review of the HTC Diamond.

They gave it 2 Stars dismissing it as a slow iPhone wannaby....

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Harsh!

P

[Guest awarner (MVP)]

Anything with an iphone look/feel display will always be classed as an iphone wannabe as that was the first.

[Guest Confucious]

Link

[Guest ~Rob]

Bah, bloomin apple fanboys!

EDIT: Saying that HTC are trying to copy apple with the angles, reflections, etc, is like saying that Apple invented web 2.0 and that web dev's use it because Apple do, nit because it's the way forward and makes things more usable!

(Out of interest is there a cdarPC article in this months PC Pro?)

Edited July 24, 2008 by ~Rob

[Guest Confucious]

(Out of interest is there a cdarPC article in this months PC Pro?)

A what? :D

[Guest ~Rob]

woah! Some bad morning spelling there! It was meant to say CarPC. I think PC Pro were there.

[Guest Confucious]

hehe - just did a search on PCPro's site and can't find anything.

In the meantime all you Diamond fans could just substitute Diamond for Athena in this conversation between an Athena and an iPhone:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.p...p;postcount=310

[Guest Monolithix]

I saw that review last week and really hate it. Talk about bias...

[Guest FATGOONER]

Link

Ive had a fair few smart phone started with the E200 but am not that good with the tweaks etc to help the performance. Does it really speed the phone up if the tweaks Paul added are applied. Just getting a bit sick of the slowness on my E650?

Cheers

[Guest jimbouk]

HTC are knackered whatever they do. They either dont innovate or their devices are slow and buggy.

I would not swap my diamond for an iphone 2...

[Guest Confucious]

I know which I'd prefer (hint - it's not the iPhone)

[Guest amd7000]

LOL. :D

What complete and utter tosh. The Diamond does have its flaws, but 2 stars, they really need to get some decent testers at pcpro.

Edited July 24, 2008 by amd7000

[Guest Neil5459]

Whilst I strongly take issue with the result of teh review, I can see their point to an extent. HTC obviously supplied a review sample, and it probably had V1.35 of the ROM (bearing in mind lead times for publication); 1.35 was a dog in terms of performance of Manila.

This doesn't excuse a business oriented magazine from looking deeper into the capabilities of the phone, especially the Office and Excahnge compatibility plus the ubiquity of available software.

For the consumer however, I would probably not recomment the Diamond as it stands, as it simply needs too much tweaking 'out of the box' to give an adequate performance, plus 'out of the box' settingsd will not give a full day's battery life.

Interstingly, PC Pro's online version reviewede the iPhone2 the following week, and concluded that there was really very little to commend it over the iPhone1 with updated firmware- but then gave it 4 stars :D

[Guest huwwatkins]

Can me cynical but aren't these magazines bias to whoever gives them the most advertising money?

I've had several windows mobile phones and as far as I can see the diamond is a huge leap forward - do they point this out? No - its mainy 'ooooh...its not an iphone!' Anyone would swear apple inveted mobile phones the way some people go on about them :D

Edited July 24, 2008 by huwwatkins

[Guest Confucious]

Can me cynical but aren't these magazines bias to whoever gives them the most advertising money?

I don't believe they are. They will not review products without being paid vast amounts of money but then tend to say what they think after charging all the same. Advertisers have very limited (if any) influence.

[Guest _dg]

TBH, I agree with the review.

As a new phone, with what is a fast processor and quite a bit of RAM, the phone under performs.

Now add the very poor battery life and the GPS issues, then it gets worse.

The design and the concept is great, but IMO, it promises a lot but just does not deliver.

Having said that I will put up with the bad in the hope that it will get better as updates become available. But if I was someone who used it more, had to rely on the features or the phone more, then it would go straight back to the shop.

[Guest jimbouk]

Mine is fast enough and the GPS works better than my Tytn2... so I am happy.

For the size of the device, it should score 5 stars.

[Guest Neil5459]

Agreed on GPS- I've had about 4 ROMs on mine now, and the GPS has been rock solid in all of them. Google Maps is a bit finicky, but once GPS is started by another app it works fine. Lock times are simply awesome. Maybe there are some out there with faulty hardware?

PC Pro this month actually refuses to give an Adobe product any recommendation despite 4 or 5 stars due to their pricing structure in UK (more in £ than the $ price despite the exchange rate) and downloadable versions more than physical copies, so they may not be motivated by advertisers.

I simply think they didn't bother to look deeper than the interface with the TD- it was reviwed by the editor, Tim Danton, rather than the Mobile Computing correspondant.

[Guest captainsensible]

A guy I work with has got the iPhone 3G and when we compared features and he had a play with my Diamond, he was, well, to put it simply, gutted!

[Guest Confucious]

When I pointed out that I thought it was a bias review Tim replied:

I can completely deny any bias – I’m an HTC Touch user. Surely I’d be biased for HTC?