The HTC Diamond promos and web write ups were promising. The gadget was launched simultaneous to the India release of the I Phone 3G. The extreme high price of the I Phone 3G , washed the dreams of owning a piece(priced 3 times the US).
On comparison with all major technical websites, the I Phone seemed to be a thing of the past. I had shunned away from Nokia for close to 6 years now because of the time I spent in the service centers (literally one day to hand over the handset for repair and one day to collect it, also the technical help acted more like u mess and Ill beat the hell out of you).
So with HTC closing in on the features of the Nokia, I chose to opt for the later. Brand HTC was gaining momentum and people were looking at the Singapore based mobile company like a Nokia, Motorola or a Sony Erricson.
I had picked up my first piece with Dopod and then moved in with HTC. The phone with all the features of an O2 but priced fairly decently for the common man to own a hi tech device. I had pick up my HTC Diamond at a price of Rs 28 thousand( the price was killing but the features lured me in) The resolution was way more than any phone released at that time.
The technology was different. This was then the first phone which included a lot of features which the HTC had failed to implement in their past phones like the FM and GPS ect. The piece is as slim and light as the Motorola V series.
The phone was the first phone ( 8 months back) which was so sleek loaded with the windows 6.1 and a 256 MB RAM. The touch flo feature was awesome, thought it takes some time getting used to the feature (a little more than some time).
The striking points were the 3D graphics used. The weather update feature had drops of water (denoting rain) on your screen which seemed so real until a wiper wipes it off. The way the message scroll went again looked something so unlike any mobile phone( flipping you finger could make the message disappear and make another message appear in its place).
The con fig of e-mails on your home screen was another unlike feature. The photo phone-book turns a pain rather than a daily use feature however the flaw is taken care off with the phone dial pad which senses whom you would want to call by just keying in the persons name like you do searching for contacts(this feature could be a pain sometimes because it automatically goes in to the text mode).
The key boards are a pain and confusing because few keyboard types take up 75% of the screen making it hard to see what you are typing. The internal memory is 4GB( you would want to carry a pen drive if you want to input more because it does not have an external memory slot).
The battery would last you for just a couple of hours at maxi mun usage ie net access, calls ectSo you are bound to carry a charger at all times( I carry a USB cord which connects to my computer and also charges. Beware if you do not have the updated software’s and patches, multiple windows open up and the whole gadget goes haywire making u think at times did I make a mistake.
The phone gets extremely hot during net access and also on charging(at times), as hot that you could anticipate an explosion. Now that the version 2 of the diamond is launched which apparently has taken care of the previous flaws after 8 months of release of the previous version (wow! that wAS LATE REALISATION Htc). Looks like its time to hibernate with HTC.