 Together
with today's launch of the
HTC Touch
Diamond, I also had the chance to get my hands on a brand new, also just
announced, German
O2 Xda diamond which is the same device like HTC's Diamond but in a slightly
different design.
However, it follows the same design principals by being thin and squarish but
unlike HTC's Diamond version, the Xda diamond has a flat "soft-touch" battery
cover.
Everything else is pretty much the same - including the black mirroring front
plate and display bezel as well as the touch sensitive D-Pad.
Quite untypical for a Windows Mobile Professional smartphone are the Home and
Back keys, HTC decided to use for the Diamond. The Home key, which basically
replaces the Start key, brings you always back to the Today screen while the
Back button always jumps back to the previous menu item - quite similar to Windows Mobile Standard smartphones. For sure the Xda diamond also features
the smartphone typical Call and End keys and - quite usual for HTC Touch
devices - there are no soft-keys for the menu but here the user has to touch the
flat touchscreen.
Like HTC's version, also O2's smartphone features a 3.2 megapixel autofocus
camera without flash on the back and in the upper right corner on the front a
VGA video telephony camera which can be used for self-portraits as well.
Unfortunately there's no hardware shutter button for the camera anymore which
means you either have to start the camera from the Start menu or from HTC's
TouchFLO 3D Today screen UI:
 
 
 
 
 
 
The device above was a preproduction unit but O2 Germany confirmed that there
will be no difference to the final design. A review follows as soon as I get my
hands on a final version.
Cheers ~ Arne
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