Not too long ago I was complaining about the memory leak and rapid memory loss on the Touch Diamond. As most Touch Diamond owners know, I’m not the only one with the problem. Luckily for us, James “Jamzb” @ XDA-Developers made a great app that graphically represents all memory usage on the Touch Diamond.

In my own test, which you can see above, Opera and TouchFlo 3D are not the biggest memory hogs. For me, it’s a temporary file. Kind of surprising, isn’t it? Turns out, it happens to be very different per user. The creator of the program posted a screenshot showing that Opera Mobile was taking up a lot of memory on his Diamond.

You can download MobileMonger from the developer’s site. Link

What’s hogging up all your memory? Post your results with Mobile Monger here.

Feature of the Day is back! As promised from two or three weeks ago, I’ll continue with the HTC Album software found on the Touch Diamond, though it is the same as the Touch Pro. HTC Album is a very nice improvement to the mundane and boring Pictures and Videos app supplied with Windows Mobile 6/6.1. If you access it from TouchFLO 3D, you get the elegant 3D photo and video viewer that for some reason reminds me of the Microsoft Surface table computer. With simple up or down gestures, you can move quickly from one photo or video to another.

In the actual HTC Album software, you have the TouchFlo 3D influenced interfaces and menus that are just more aethetically pleasing to the eye than the Windows Mobile app. With HTC Album, photos and videos are viewed in the same app, unlike its WM counterpart that needs Windows Media Player to play videos. This is much more convenient.

When viewing a photo in HTC Album, the picture adjusts itself to the orientation of the phone much faster than other apps that use the accelerometer. For zooming in, you spin your finger clockwise. Likewise, to zoom out, you spin you finger counter-clockwise. It’s pretty neat seeing that actually work. Another option for zooming in and out is by using the touch scroll wheel built into the hardware panel. You can pan between different photos or videos by swiping you finger from side to side on the screen. While you are viewing a picture, a single tap on the screen gets you the most convenient options with a simple TouchFLO 3D style menu for more options.

You get the same nice experience with the slideshow part of HTC Album. The default has a nice and subtle fading transition between each picture, making it very elegant. You can also change the animations and delays for the slideshow

On the whole, the HTC Album stands out as one of the most heavily worked on apps by HTC. It’s a good thing they did, as it turned out to be such a great addition to both the Touch Diamond and Pro.

You know you love the graphic. Unfortunately, it’s true. The Diamond has a HUGE memory leak in main memory. Don’t get me wrong, the Diamond is an amazing and revolutionary device, but considering some versions give you about 64K or less of Main Memory to accomadate temp files, history, loading programs into memory, etc., it’s a big issue.

I’ve encountered this problem quite a few times now and it’s a pretty annoying thing to keep having a message showing “Main memory is low. Delete some files…” or something like that keep popping up while using Opera or having the YouTube app suddenly close after buffering. Where’s this problem stemming from? Is it TouchFLO 3D? Let’s find out.
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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.

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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The Touch Diamond and Pro are getting a major overhaul with some pretty cool 3rd party software. Where TouchFLO 3D left off with hiding Windows Mobile, Touch Xperience starts. It gives the Start Menu a much cleaner touch friendly menu. If you’re tired of the TouchFLO 3D or just want a change, you can use the included Touch Home interface which allows widgets and custom layouts via XML documents.

Specifically for the touch diamond and pro, the rotation with the g-sensor is extended to all apps and you can use gestures on the d pad to execute different actions or programs. The most interesting feature off this application is the custom profiles. You can make your phone perform a certain function or task based on different events and conditions. You can even have actions based on GPS locations!

From their website, here are the examples:
Enable flight mode during nights
Connect to Wi-Fi while battery is charging
Deactivate alarm when I turn my device face down
Put phone in silent mode at workplace
Remind me to buy bread when I’m near to the bakery

Unfortunately, this program is still in beta testing. If you want, you’ll need to apply to the waiting list over at XDA-Developers.

Via PocketNow - Notice this article’s by Brandon

The people over at XDA-Developers have worked their magic again. A new unofficial radio ROM has been released to allow for the use of the GSM 850 band. This allows use of AT&T’s EDGE network which utilizes the 850 band and makes the device a lot more appealing for import from Europe or Asia. If you think about it, it’s not a long way from here to see the European/Asian Diamond have 1700/2100 for T-Mobile 3G data and use the 900 bands for voice.

Via Engadget Mobile