Alright guys, the yellow DHL man dropped a Touch Pro on my doorstep today. The unboxing experience was the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s not as thick as pictures make it out to be. It’s less wide and tall than most phones (like the AT&T Tilt, for example), so you don’t notice the depth as much when in hand or in your pocket.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be following in Nishanth’s footsteps by posting about unique features of the Touch Pro - it’s got a few differences to the Diamond, like the keyboard (duh), microSD expansion, bigger battery, and TV-Out.

Until then - go ahead, ask me anything about the Touch Pro!

Everyone has seen the Touch Diamond Weather application. It’s fun and different with all of its exaggerated animations. Like most others, I’d say the rain animation is the best. But all of this is useless if you can’t even get the weather for the city that you live in or are planning to travel to. Since HTC uses Accuweather as their source for all weather information, you would think that you could change it, but HTC taken the liberty of hiding it somewhere in the OS files. Of course, with XDA-dev being PPC hack central, there’s bound to be a way to get around this big oversight by HTC. At first there was a long and tedious method of doing this that involved a lot of hex editing, modifying TouchFLO 3D’s core and other nasty stuff that can really mess up your phone. Luckily for all of us, andreas.falke from XDA-Developers has made a nice and clean app that doesn’t even mess with all the stuff from the old method. It’s called WeatherDatabaseEditor, WDE for short. Could they be any more creative with names at XDA?

Here’s what you need to do:
Download WDE v1.1 from here. Make sure your Diamond has Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework 3.5 installed. Odds are that it came with it.
Go to accuweather.com and search for your city. In the url in the address bar, after it says .com, there will be a section that goes something like /us/”state name”/”city name”, where state and city names are the names of your state and city. If you live in the US, you location code will begin with the prefix NAM and will be like this: NAM|US|”state name”|”city name”. Europe’s prefix is EUR and will be like this EUR|”country name”|”country area”|”city name”. It is similar for other continents and countries
Open WDE v1.1 and add you city. Then close the program.
Go back to TouchFLO 3D’s weather tab. You can now add your city from the list.

What? There’s no feature of the day? Well, yes, the Touch Diamond Feature of the Day will be taking a small break while we get back to the world with some updates. I thought that as I’ve covered most of the hardware, I’d take a break from that, even though I promised to deliver about the HTC Album app today. I think I’ll make you wait :D.

Anyway, today’s topic is about the rumored red Touch Diamond supposedly going to Sprint, as found by an AllTouchSite regular reader, Shelley Bevacqua. r0fl from SprintUsers.com found three promotional images for the Touch Diamond, all showing the red-backed Touch Diamond, which incidentally, is set for a September 2nd release.. It looks very cool, but you have to be a little skeptical. WindowsMobile Cool posted earlier today that it was probably Photoshopped for some “fast and easy quick internet fame.” If it is a fake, it’s a pretty good fake with the image tilted in a Sprint-styled way, the Sprint logo, and the accented TouchFLO 3D tabs. Who knows?

What do you think? Post your ideas here.

The Touch Diamond Feature of the Day continues on! Today, I’ll be giving you a brief on both the main and secondary cameras. The main camera, which every variant of the Diamond will come with, is a 3.15 MP camera with autofocus. The main camera lives up to expectations and is one of the few smartphone cameras that can actually substitute as a camera. The color quality was vivid both indoors and outdoors. The autofocus is a nice touch that really helps with macro (close-range) photography and brings out textures and can also be used for taking pictures of text, which makes it useful with a scanner application like ScanR. Read on to find out more and see some test images taken with both cameras.
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Today’s feature is one that really makes the Diamond a good buy: the GPS system. The Diamond sports onboard aGPS, which gives you the freedom of not having to go around with a separate Bluetooth GPS reciever that will drain both the phone and reciever battery. Some Touch Diamonds come equipped with TomTom Navigator 7 GPS software, but as the Diamond is running Windows Mobile, you’re given the freedom to use anything you want, such as CoPilot 7 or iGo.

New GPS users may not know this (I found out the hard way), but there are three parts to a GPS system: Hardware, Software, and Maps. The bad thing is that none of these come for free. Luckily, at least for the people who get TomTom Navigator 7 with their Diamond, you can get one free map download before having to pay. As of now, the only maps specifically designed for the Diamond are Eastern and Western Europe maps. If you need other regions, you’ll need to use the newest TomTom Navigator 6 maps with it. If you’re Diamond didn’t come equipped with TomTom Navigator 7, it is available on XDA-Developers from the ROM dumps.

Back to the Diamond’s GPS. Once you get some software running on it, it works pretty well. Almost immediately, I got a fix from about 8-10 different satellites while inside a building using TomTom. As I drove around, the GPS followed very closely, but at some points there is a noticeable lag in the GPS unit. In fact, for some people, GPS lag around bridges and other areas are so bad that it shows where they were about 3-6 seconds ago. An example from XDA-Developers is shown below: (credit: Cyphol @ XDA-Developers)

Other than that, the GPS system worked great. I was able to get turn-by-turn directions a little bit before they occurred and like the voice instructions feature that is part of many popular GPS systems these days. It allows you give your whole attention to the road ahead of you instead of periodically looking at a GPS system that can be a dangerous distraction.

Why suddenly am I talking about the hardware panel when I’ve been writing about software? Well, today I’ve got some breaking news over from XDA-Developers. I’ll explain more about that below. First off, the hardware panel on the Touch Diamond includes a D-Pad, scroll wheel, center button and four hard buttons: Home, Back, Answer/Start call key, and End Call Key. Read on to find out about the multitouch features on the Diamond!

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A keen user over at XDA-Developers has gotten his hands on a HTC Touch Pro sporting a ROM with AT&T branding. Further proof of it being a real US-variant of the Touch Pro: it has no front-facing camera, and the keys are changed so that there is no longer a dedicated row of numbers at the top. More as it comes!

Continuing on with the one feature a day, today’s feature will be the music player in TouchFLO 3D. The interface looks very similar (stressing very) to Apple’s CoverFlow. However, it has also been compared to Flip3D in Windows Vista. Either way, the interface is very nice and easy to use. Flicking your finger up goes forward on the playlist while flicking your finger down goes back.

At this point, I’m not sure if the underlying app for this music player is a custom build by HTC like the Audio Manager in the original HTC Touch or if it is actually using Windows Media Player. It sure doesn’t look like WMP, though. When navigating the your Library from TouchFLO 3D, you immediately notice it being styled after TouchFLO with the banner at the bottom and the easy to control selections, as shown below:
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Starting from today and continuing on into next week, I’ll be giving you some information about one feature a day of the Touch Diamond that you know little about or you probably want to find out more about that particular feature.

Today, I’ll be starting with the FM Radio (not to be random or anything…:D). Let’s start out by giving a physical description. The FM Radio antenna isn’t actually in the Touch Diamond, it’s in the headphones. Unfortunately, this means that you must plug in your headphones into your Diamond to listen to the radio. Never fear, by touching the headphone icon on the FM Radio program shown below, you can toggle between using the device speakers and the headphones, but you still will have the headphones dangling out of the ExtUSB port.

Once you open the actual software, you find a nice very clean interface that goes with the rest of TouchFLO 3D. At the top, the text toggles between radio frequency and the radio station name, giving you the name of the song playing below. In the center, you have nav buttons to search for other networks above or below the current frequency automatically or manually. You can also choose for mono/stereo audio, speaker/headphone output and mute/unmute volume here. At the bottom, there are six slots available for presets.

When you first plugin the headphones, the Diamond will automatically scan the area for signals and designate the six presets to the first clear channels it can find. The sound quality is very loud and crisp, with the two headphones giving you the sensation of a miniature home theater system in your ears.

It’s a pretty amazing experience, though it’s even better with the music player in TouchFLO 3D. Look for that feature next time.

For those out there who are trying to get a good idea of how big the Diamond really is, here’s a great comparison of the Touch Diamond to the T-Mobile Shadow (AKA HTC Juno) and the T-Mobile MDA (AKA HTC Wizard). The MDA was chosen as a comparison to previous HTC-made touchscreen phones and the Shadow was chosen to represent one of the most recent smartphones from HTC (Not to mention that they’re also the only two smartphones in my house :D). As you can see in the picture above, the Touch Diamond is the thinnest of the three, just beating the Shadow out by a few millimeters. Looking at the picture, you’ll also notice that the Touch Diamond and the Shadow or about the same size. Below, you can see the how thick the Diamond is in comparison to the other two phones. You can view more comparisons below:

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