HTC Touch Diamond

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All of screens offer similar levels of Windows Mobile customisation and graphical baubles. The Mail page features an open envelope with the first few lines of your most recent message poking out – drag your finger downwards and the previous message is displayed.

On the Music screen, album art is displayed on an animated rolodex, aping the iPhone's Coverflow display; and a similar approach is taken to favourite contacts, with portraits attached to your favourite people displayed in finger-navigable format. In fact the only remnants of Windows Mobile, at least for much of the time you use the Touch Diamond, are the status bar at the top of the screen and the two 'soft', context sensitive, buttons at the bottom.

The Touch Diamond is also notable in that it includes the latest version of Opera Mobile, tweaked to integrate it with TouchFLO 3D. Opera Mobile 9.5 is a brilliant mobile web browser – you can't perform multi-touch pinches to zoom in and out, but the overview and double-click-to-zoom approach works almost as effectively. If you want to fine tune your zoom level, simply sweep a finger around the round select button, just below the screen.

Opera Mobile’s page rendering is extremely reliable, too. Websites that don't quite work on the iPhone's Safari browser are fine here, and the Touch Diamond's 480 x 640 screen means you can actually read text, such as BBC News’ weather summary on the, when you're fully zoomed out. Awesome is not a word we use very often, but this browser is precisely that.

The Touch Diamond is very pocketable and it's significantly less of a burden on your pocket than the iPhone. HTC has also done its utmost to squeeze as much hardware into the Diamond's svelte frame. The processor is a 528MHz Qualcomm unit and there's 192MB of RAM, along with 4Gb of internal storage.

As well as GPS, the Touch Diamond also has an accelerometer that detects when the phone is flipped on its side and rotates the screen’s image accordingly – just like the iPhone, in fact. The feature is exploited wonderfully (and aided by vibrating haptic feedback) by a strangely addictive marble maze game where you tip the phone up to roll a ball around, avoiding dropping it down awaiting holes as you go.

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