HTC Touch Diamond

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But while the Touch Diamond is sexy, slim and stuffed with features, it feels like a rushed product – and that’s not what a phone attempting to compete with Apple's best effort can afford to be. The finish is not polished – the flush front fascia looks plasticky and the multi-faceted 'diamond' back plate feels cheap. A big disappointment considering how well made the Touch, Touch Dual and TyTN II were.

Given the excellent mobile web browser, it's also frustrating that entering text is much more difficult than it should be. We liked the variety of text entry methods on offer – there’s a choice of numeric keypad, compact 20-key Qwerty and full blown Qwerty keyboards – but text-entry boxes often disappear behind the input panel – a basic problem that should have been caught early on.

There's also the irritation that despite the Diamond's multimedia pretensions, HTC still insists on using a USB port for the stereo headset connection, which means you can’t use your own earphones for listening to music.

A bigger problem is that the 4Gb of internal memory can’t be expanded, since there’s no memory card slot. 4Gb of onboard storage is certainly generous, but not being able to expand it is a serious failing. And the biggest issues are yet to come.

The first is that the Touch Diamond is sluggish. Sweep your finger across the screen and animations can take half a second to spring to life. Tap the internet icon, and the page often delays before it finally deciding to appear. The animations themselves often look jerky and that automatic screen reorientation is not 100% reliable. You can adjust the bias from battery saving to processor speed, which improves matters a little, but it's still prone to frequent delays.

And this brings us to the second big problem with the Touch Diamond – the battery. In order to squeeze everything in to the handset, the battery has clearly suffered. Despite the big, beefy processor, there's only a tiny 900mAh lithium ion unit inside to provide power and that's just not enough for a Windows Mobile device.

You'll struggle to get more than two days use out of the Touch Diamond and if you start browsing the web intensively, listening to music or doing anything other than making and receiving the odd phone call, that figure will fall dramatically.

The HTC Touch Diamond is certainly a neat little handset – the TouchFLO 3D is slick and attractive, and the crisp VGA screen is a joy to behold. But the poor battery life and pedestrian performance make it a less than ideal addition to any pocket and if you’re hungry for a multimedia smartphone with similar features, we’d advise hanging on for the iPhone 3G.

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