Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Diamond Geezer

Big day in the mobile industry yesterday, as HTC announced the latest in a long line of mobile devices. This one's called the "Diamond". Hmmm, but what's different? We'll there had been a huge amount of hype leading up to the event, and it turns out that the big talking point was HTC's "revolutionary" Touch Flo 3D interface. We've already seen the Touch Flo on a couple of HTC's offering's but this is the first time we've seen the 3D bit.

To be fair it looks like a pretty decent device if you check out all the specs, and you like that sort of thing.

However, it appears the industry (or rather the blogs I read), and particularly Palm-Mac and 247 aren't entirely falling over themselves with joy and gushing praise of this device? And the reasons?

Well I think Murray at palm-Mac who seems especially astute about these things sums it up nicely:

"I was following CSM's coverage of the HTC launch today and it is funny that yesterday they were calling it the "iPhone Killer" and after the launch that had slipped back to "iPhone Challenger". So guys, which is it? Sounds like they are now not so sure themselves.

It looks like a fantastic toy with a couple of possible flaws...only 4gb of internal storage (when the iPhone is now virtually minimum 16gb) and NO external sd card capability says to me...mistake...and add in the small 900amh battery and it makes you wonder if what looks like a small battery on paper will be able to cope with the heavy duty specs and swishy swooshy interface. You would like to think that HTC have done their homework and after testing have opined that the battery will be suitable for what looks like their flagship device."

Certainly the battery could be an issue - the much derided Treo 680 battery only packed 1200mAh, and this one's 300mAh less - although admittedly you can't necessarily compare like for like other than rated power.

And what's this about no external card storage. Sure, there's lot's of memory, but people like to put stuff on external storage cards and many find it easier to transfer their stuff that way than via syncing.

We'll have to wait and see what the man in the street thinks of it. Anyway it might all be moot when Apple bring out their next gen device later this summer.


And whilst I'm on the subject of HTC, am I the only person in the world who doesn't like their HTC Home Screen Plugin? All black and uninteresting?

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