HTC Touch Diamond (Verizon Wireless)

Pros: ? Numerous features
? TouchFlo3D interface,
? Form factor/appearance
? Outstanding resistive touch sreen.

Cons: ? DOG SLOW
? Battery life is poor
? WM components of the interface are dated and clunky
? Difficult text entry (due to slow performance)

Summary: I ordered this online from Verizon hoping for a little mobile nirvana that I so desperately crave. The FedEx package arrived the next day in typical unadorned Verizon white.

It has all the right features, but as Bonnie said above it is slow. Actually that is an understatement, it crawls! Doing everyday things like texting, email and playing music bring the phone to its knees.

In fear of warranty cancellation, I desperately applied a few registry hacks and a few tuning tricks that I read around the web, which helped a little. You can also turn off TF3D which also helps, but it is still very slow to multi-task even on the basic (and horrendous) WM GUI. I never did actually crash, but let me tell you I thought it did often.

Post tweak, TouchFlo 3D actually became somewhat responsive, but still, anytime the phone is asked to do more than one thing at a time, everything grinds to a halt. Frequently when that happened, I would just put the phone down, take a breath, and pick it back up when it sorted out, which it always did.

If you use the phone just for calling the battery isn't bad. The minute you start surfing, emailing, texting or just in general fooling around with it, you can literally watch the battery meter fall. So while the talk/standby numbers are probably accurate, if you actually use the phone as your PC as I do, forget it. Pack your charger and a spare battery. For comparison, my son has the unlocked G-Phone which

For positives, this has the best resistive touch screen ever. The screen registers slides and swipes (when the OS can keep up) as easily as that fruit based phone. It doesn?t have multi-touch, but employs several other tricks keep it interesting.

In summary, this goes back to Verizon today. I'm back on my trusty but crap-tastic LG Dare, which has the worst touch screen ever, but otherwise, works great as a phone and text platform.

I really wanted to like this phone, but in the end it really let me down.

Doing everyday things like texting, email and playing music bring the phone to it's knees. In fear of warranty I applied a few registry hacks and a few tuning tricks that I read around the web, which helped a little. Touch flow actually became quite responsive, but anytime the phone is asked to do more than one thing at a time, everything stops. When that happened, I would just put the phone down, take a breath, and pick it up when it sorted out, which it always did.

I never did actually crash, but let me tell you I thought it did often.

If you use the phone just for callling the battery isn't bad. The minute you start surfing, emailing, or just in general fooling around with it, you can litterally watch the battery meter fall. So while the talk/standby numbers are probably accurate, if you actually use the phone as your PC as I do, forget it. Pack your charger and a spare battery.

Updated on Apr 23, 2009

To correct the typo above (end of the 5th paragraph) I wanted to say that the G1 which also has aweful batterly life was not as bad.