HTC Diamond2 Sim-Free Windows Mobile Touchscreen Phone

Almost my dream smart phone,

Slim, Light, a very nice sized high res screen.

Short battery life : if you are browsing internet, checking emails regularly or playing games, the battery runs out very quickly.
Gravity Sensor : with some applications it does not work, you are stuck in portrait mode.

Connectivity : Great, I can use WIFI, connect to my home wireless, or Wireless hotspots, almost a laptop like control and feel to connectivity features. GPRS, BlueTooth, GPS is standard, however the installed GPS application (Google Maps) is not very good, but there are many good free GPS apps available on internet.

Internet Browsing: Opera Mini does not play Flash videos, I installed skyfire and it works a treat.

Crashes : It happened twice in the first week, when i put the device to sleep, it could not wake up, had to take the battery out and put it back in again to recover. I think this fault is down to Windows Mobile OS rather than the handset.
I cleared storage and restarted, it has been working ok now. hopefully HTC will release a windows 6.5 image when it is released.

Email's functionality is great : supports internet and exchange setup.

Navigation, Buttons and Themes: HTC's Touch Flow gives same experience as experience than iPhone, however there not many applications available for Windows Mobile. If Touch flo is enabled it hides windows theme.

If your previous handset had a key pad, On screen touch features will take a little time getting used to, but iphone users will find it very familiar.

Techies can tweak things further by changing underlying windows mobile features.

Overall a very good smart phone, One star deducted for Crashes but I can overlook that because rest of the features work great.

I have had this phone for a couple of months now.

I had a PDA for years and wanted to upgrade, which included a phone, so spent a lot of time researching various products. I have not been disappointed, as it works great as a PDA. It has never crashed, and works great with my vista laptop.

I agree with other reviews that the battery life is poor. If you are using it all day, then I would suggest increasing your purchase to include a secondary charger. I got a cheap, car charger.

Memory is not very high, so recommend purchasing a card, I went for an 8gb, which appears very adequate for my needs. Music & photo's will sync with Media Player.

If you are a fan of the Ipod, I think you will be disappointed, whilst listening to music. Switching between tracks is slightly cumbersome. Personally I bought this to be a phone + features of a PDA. I do not listen to large amounts of music.

The Touch Flo interface is amazing, if you switch it off, it reverts back to Windows Mobile interface, which is good and mirrors the interface of most PDA's, so I found this very familiar. However I am sure once you disable the Touch Flo, you will be enable it within minutes. It is so easy to use, and looks great

If your looking for a phone / PDA then this is the one. This phone will be hard to beat.

One other thing, I recommend getting a cover!

I don't like Windows as an operating system, not on a PC, and not on a phone. But so far I've found that the only phones which meet with my requirements have been Windows based mobiles - though that may well change with the meteoric rise of both the i-Phone and the impressive Android operating system.

After using the first MDA Diamond for a year, it was time for a change. I had a brief spell with a Samsung Tocco but realised that I missed many of the functions of the MDA and naturally decided on the second generation of the Diamond. Lesser smartphones collapse under the weight of the cumbersome operating system, but the MDA Diamond II transcends it by hiding it behind it's own fancy user interface - TouchFlo 3D.

TouchFlo worked well on the original Diamond, but it felt bolted on and I found that after a while it stuttered a bit and lost responsiveness. The Diamond II must have some memory improvements or some pretty nifty ways to improve efficiency because TouchFlo maintains a good level of responsiveness and as well as cutting the mustard in terms of functionality - it looks pretty sexy. Sliding your grubby digits across the screen to create fingerprints on the glossy exterior never looked so good as the 3D menus smoothly animate and scroll at the pace you want them to. You don't have to use the stylus anymore as the significantly bigger screen with improve resolution (WVGA rather than plain old VGA) means you have bigger buttons and wider menu bars - of course the stylus is still there but you won't need to bring it out anywhere near so frequently.

My main problems with the first Diamond were it's lag in responsiveness and the disappointing way it overlooked it's self orientating screen. Well, as I've already mentioned - the second version of this phone is quicker and although it does start to slow down once several applications are active simultaneously, it's not as noticeable and it handles more before it gets to that stage. The first MDA also had an impressive rotating display - but it was woefully underused, in fact it was quite possible to own the phone for a year and never even realise it had the functionality! This has been addressed in version two though and now when composing e-mails or text messages I can hold the phone 'landscape' and the screen rotates. This gives you a larger on-screen keyboard and whereas texting whilst on the bus, or as a passenger in a car was a nightmare before as any little movement had you tapping the wrong key with your stylus - now you can type away with ease! That's a big bonus for me and was the main reason I considered this phone over one with a dedicated QWERTY keyboard.

The addition of a MicroSD card slot is a welcome feature. After owning several MDA smartphones I simply assumed that the original Diamond would accommodate a memory card and took the phone to pieces looking for the slot before it dawned on me that there was nowhere to slot my 2 Gig beasty (2 gig was pretty impressive then!). Now I can enjoy all my media files on the move by popping them all on a MicroSD card, and it can be swapped between devices when necessary. I actually use a MAC for home use and find it far easier to drag and drop files to a memory card rather than beaming via bluetooth or linking up via cable.

I do however use a cable when I'm syncing with my works laptop. Synchronising with Outlook is where I have to reluctantly admit that Windows excels; all my contacts were on Outlook and after connecting the cable and using ActiveSync I had all those contacts on my new phone within a few minutes. My appointments and reminders were all present and correct too. Job done!

In a nutshell: The MDA Diamond was a very good phone, and instead of making any radical changes HTC have tweaked it and worked on the niggles to come up with a faster newer model. If you already have a Diamond and move to a Diamond II then the small changes will make a big difference. For me it's like a totally different phone as I'm now happy to use TouchFlo, which means the phone looks and handles very differently - and at times I even forget that Windows is on there! Surely it's only a matter of time before HTC release a phone with their own TouchFlo inspired Operating System.