Breaking news: real-life, comparative HTC Diamond 2 shots!

[Guest Menneisyys]

While at Microsoft’s stand at MWC the just-announced Diamond 2 was behind glass and couldn’t be used, at HTC’s booth anyone could give them a test ride. In the following, I post my first thoughts of the device.

First and foremost, I just don’t like it. It’s just too thick and has an outdated hardware. In the era of 1 GHz CPUs (where the faster clock also means FAR better performance – see my real-world benchmarks of the 1GHz Toshi TG01 HERE), I find it just lame to announce a device with a 528 MHz, oldish, not very capable CPU.

As I’ve mentioned several times, the lack of competition has definitely made HTC lazy and refusing to invent revolutionary stuff. If HTC was just one manufacturer of the many, this wouldn’t be a problem. But, given that HTC is the leading one and Windows Mobile’s future largely depends on the generic acceptance of HTC’s models, not inventing any more is a serious mistake. In addition, they don’t seem to even fix bugs and errors plaguing a lot (if not all) their devices; see for example the infamous touchscreen CPU usage bug causing major problems on all non-Xscale platforms.

I consider their latest-and-greatest model, the Diamond 2, equally uninteresting and unimaginative. I, who have an iPhone 3G, may get the Nokia N97 (which turned out to be much better in real life – I’ve played with it quite a bit at MWC – than I previously thought) and will surely get the Toshi TG01 if it’s not as bug-ridden as Toshi’s earlier QWERTY sliders, the G900/G910, the Diamond 2 is a huge, thick and slow device that simply doesn’t have anything I would happily pay for.

Let’s see some (also comparative – with the BlackBerry 8800 and the iPhone 3G) pictures I’ve taken at MWC. As you can see, the Diamond 2 is pretty large and is much thicker than the iPhone. If it was a power device with the latest and greatest technology, I could easily forget this. But for a phone with a pretty mediocre CPU, there is just no excuse.

The device reported on low memory after a while…:

Interestingly, the list of running programs didn’t have any seemingly offending entry (and the total program memory was still over 35 Mbytes – of the 288 free):