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.

 

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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.

 

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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!

 

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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.

 

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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 saying “the grass is greener on the other side” is probably the most true with this new information leak about the releases on the Touch Diamond and Pro. As these two phones make their way state side, they lose a lot of the luster they had, at least in the case of Verizon. Furthermore, the releases for Sprint have been pushed back to early September, while Verizon will make their releases in early October.

For Sprint:
The Touch Diamond will stay the same as the original HTC specs and will be branded as the HTC Victor.

The Touch Pro will lose the 4GB internal storage, but will have an increase to 512MB of ROM storage space. It will be branded as the HTC Herman. Weird names, aren’t they?

For Verizon:
The Touch Diamond loses its 4GB internal storage will come with a microSD slot instead, sporting 512MB of ROM. The processor for it has been underclocked to 400MHz instead of the 528MHz of the regular Touch Diamond. Not only that, it also loses the accelerometer! The one thing it does gain is a stainless steel frame instead of the aluminum, but this will drive the price up. It will be branded as the HTC Victor.

The Touch Pro also loses the 4GB internal storage for the 512MB ROM space and similar features to the Touch Diamond are lost (g-sensor, processor, etc.). It will be branded as the HTC Raphael.

On a last note, both phones on both carriers come equipped with a decent 1340mAh battery. However, that’s a small comfort for the features lost.

You can look at the side-by-side comparison of the Sprint and Verizon Touch Diamond features here and the Touch Pro here.

Via IntoMobile

 

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If you really want a Touch Pro and are willing to forgo eating for 2 months, you can pick one up on eBay for $1045.95. The price includes shipping, and the auction mentions that the phone may not ship for another 10-15 days. So essentially, it’s just another preorder, like the one found at Mobile Planet.

 

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