HTC Touch Diamond2 review

The HTC Touch Diamond2 has clearly been designed to make surfing the net on the move as easy as possible. The browser interface is hugely simple to use, although it is a little irritating that to get to the URL bar when you’re on a page already you have to tap on an ‘expand’ icon on the bottom of the page. To zoom into a page, you simply have to double tap on the section you want to read and you’re zoomed in. There’s also support for multiple tabs so you can switch between different applications.

Push internet makes its debut on the HTC Touch Diamond2. It works the same as push email, where your most read web pages are updated and sent to your mobile so you don’t have to enter the URL every time you want to check the latest headlines or check your web-based emails. To access the web page, you simply click on the bookmark from the internet homescreen. The advantage of this is that if you don’t have a web connection, you can check the web page offline.

HTC has followed its competitors, including Palm and the Apple iPhone with threaded messaging. This applies for both text and email messaging, and makes it much easier to follow a conversation.

The People tab is probably the best contact management system available on mobile. It can be described as a favourite contacts menu, but goes a lot further than just ensuring your most used contacts are easy to access.

You add contacts to it by tapping on the People icon from the standby screen and add a new contact from your phonebook by tapping on the ‘+’ icon.

From the contact’s information screen, you can view their phone numbers and email address. You can also send a message, email or trigger a phone call by tapping on the appropriate field.

At the bottom, there are four icons, enabling you to cycle through the different modes of communication, including your text and email history in threaded format, information about every phone call to and from that contact and all contact information with the option to send an email/text or make a phonecall.

Even if you don’t decide to put your contacts in the People menu, you can still view you messaging history and call history from the phonebook by toggling through the icons at the bottom of the screen.

Another communication aid is that when you receive a phone call from someone not in your phonebook it asks if you want to save the contact after the call has ended. This is very handy if you receive a lot of calls from new numbers and need to save them immediately.

To make typing emails and messages easier, HTC had introduced Touch Input. Not only do you get haptic feedback when you type each letter on the virtual QWERTY keyboard, making it much easier to type than on previous HTC touchscreen models, but the letters pop up like on the iPhone so you can see instantly which letter you’ve pressed.