HTC Touch Diamond mobilephone
While the whole world is all caught up with tomorrow’s launch of the iPhone 3G (a dude here in Tokyo has been camping outside a SoftBank store in Omotesando since Monday!!), I was given a run-through of the HTC Touch Diamond cellphone by TMK, whom I happened to bump into on the train.
To be very honest, I don’t really keep up with the mobile phone scene outside of Japan therefore I don’t know what kind of stuff the Western world gets. After today’s intro to the HTC Touch Diamond, I finally realised that the touch screen interface has pretty much sprung up everywhere (LG Prada phone). Kind of a bummer cuz it makes Apple not special anymore… hahaha.
Besides the nifty touch interface, the HTC Touch Diamond also sports a full web browser made by Opera (TMK works for Opera, btw) which is similar to iPhone’s Safari but has some better functions which are lacking from the iPhone such as, text re-flowing to the size of the screen when zoomed in (eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling), holding your finger on an image for a second or more would bring up a menu for saving the image, etc., etc. I mean, these are features which seem unforgivable for being omitted from the mighty iPhone’s Safari browser!
Besides that, the HTC Touch Diamond is a pretty slick looking mobile phone which is thin, simple and elegantly designed and pretty much does everything a smartphone can. The user interface is also something that would appeal to a lot of graphics tarts… but to real designers, the interface graphics could be a lot more simple like how Apple does it…
Checkout TMK’s HTC Touch Diamond blog entry for more info about the phone and how he got this yet-to-be-released-in-Japan phone working now.
Yes, everybody has touch screens now, but what still makes Apple different is that their touch works better. Not because of software features, no, others often require multiple touches to register.
It seems that Apple’s just works better in that regard.