Windows Phone Thoughts: PC Pro Slams the HTC Touch Diamond

"A frustrating phone in every way. Some excellent touches promise so much - including a great screen and web browser - but in use it's unbearably slow. When weighing your decision whether or not to buy the HTC Touch Diamond, we'd suggest you keep one dominant image in your mind: a set of old-fashioned scales. In the left, we'll put the Bad stuff. And in the right, we'll throw in all the Good. Very little about this product falls in between. Let's start off with the Bad."

What a great example of the media's double standards. They give the Diamond 2/6 stars and heavily criticize the battery life for not lasting through heavy use over a weekend. Their review of the iPhone 3G, a 5/6 star device, mentions that you'll need to charge the device every other day even with moderate use. So why is one product slammed and one product just barely criticized? It's like everyone is terrified to criticize the iPhone. Ridiculous.

However, on the speed of the Diamond, which is his primary complaint, I have to agree with him somewhat - even with the latest ROM update from a couple of weeks back, it's still too slow. Sometimes moving from element to element happens reasonably quickly, but there's still a delay where nothing happens at all. That might have been acceptable three years ago, but it's not acceptable today. Too often, it will stall out moving from one thing to the next. The funny thing is that even with that criticism, it's still the best Professional device I've used overall, at least one without a keyboard. On the stability front, even with no third party applications installed, I've had to soft reset it once after about a week of using it, which was a bit disappointing. Since then it's been two weeks without need for a reset, which is pretty good - although I'm spoiled by my T-Mobile Dash; I might have to reboot it once every three months at the worst.

On the looks front, the HTC Touch Diamond does very well. I took it to an AMD event in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and the "wow" factor it had when people looked at it was interesting - everyone loved it, until they started using it and guess what the first thing they said was? "Hmm - it's not very fast, is it?". That's an unfortunate reality about the state of the Touch Diamond right now - I'm really hoping that over the next few months, HTC's software engineers can optimize the Touch Diamond further and eliminate some of those delays.

Shockingly for any of you who know how I feel about most Apple products, I'm probably going to pick up an iPod Touch (likely a used one) so I can get more hands-on time with Apple's on-screen keyboard - I want to understand the subtleties of their approach vs. HTCs, because I can't seem to get any comfortable degree of accuracy with the Diamond's on-screen keyboard...I make error after error and I'm longing for a physical keyboard again.

Touch Diamond owners: how's your experience with the device so far? Do you agree with this review and rating of 2/6 stars?