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Recently I was forced to go and buy myself a new cell because the speaker of the previous one (QTEC S200) was broken. This meant no ring tones anymore and I just couldn’t live with the fact that I had to check my phone at least every hour to see if there weren’t any missed calls.
Now after a very long and intensive search for a new cell, mainly within the product range of HTC, LG and Apple I decided to get myself the new HTC Touch Diamond II. This decision was mainly based upon the fact that LG didn’t support 3rd party applications, which I still consider a huge design flaw, and Apple, well everybody wants one or has one an nobody can use all provided hardware functionality (GPS for ex.)
Home Panel TouchFLO 3D
After using the Touch Diamond II for about a week or two I developed a deep love for it. But like every love, there are those small annoyances which I’m going to elaborate on right now.
TouchFLO 3D (Manila)
Ever since HTC started creating more stylish phones and sales went up they finally decided to build a wrapper interface around Windows Mobile and boy was that necessary! I didn’t have it yet in my previous model but upgraded the ROM to get a preview. However, the TDII does have this feature. It gives you convenient access to all core functionality by using your fingers instead of the stylus.
Now, what is wrong with it? Well it still contains bugs that shouldn’t be there! Not the usual bugs that you encounter once in a while, no, visible functionality that isn’t implemented properly. There were a couple of things that bothered me:
- It still crashes way to frequently, certainly while using the music player.
- The battery last for about 12 hours including usage of about 4 hours. This implies that the phone has to be charged almost every single night!
- An option exists to receive a delivery report, but it gets unchecked after every single sms, which is annoying as hell!
- Changing the background means going from the options panel to the home panel back and forth just to preview it.
- Everything in windows mobile is wrapped in a nicer interface except the events in a calendar, why? Same for adding a new event!
- When it receives an sms it displays a notification, but when you select it you get redirected to the old sms interface, not the new wrapper!
- Facebook is integrated in the contact manager. The functionality provides a linker that links your contacts with your friends on Facebook, after which it downloads their avatar and birthday. The sad thing is, it isn’t activated yet and can only be so by messing with the registry.
- Everything is touch friendly except for the alphabetic enumeration at the side of the contact list, which is so small you just have to grab the stylus to select a letter. Same for the keyboard. Lovely keyboard, really, but if you want to speed up your writing you really need that stylus.
- A lot of issues have been reported about the alarms that didn’t went off. Mainly this bug is caused if an event notification is shown prior to the alarm. Yesterday I discovered that my alarm didn’t go off because my phone just switched itself off completely!
- The agenda panel is a monthly view of the calendar, why is that, it doesn’t give a lot of valuable information apart from the days an event takes place. What about a viewing all event within a week or maybe even 2?
Calendar Panel TouchFLO 3D
These are the main bugs and usability issues that really annoy me about this phone. There are lots more, smaller ones that didn’t made it to this top ten, however, most of them cause minor stress.
As a summary I just want to stress the fact that this is a really great phone and as every new and complex piece of technology it most likely to contain a few issues. I would still recommend most users to buy this phone as I am certain that most of these issues will be resolved once HTC comes with a new ROM update around September, including the new Windows Mobile 6.5. And if these issues are not resolved by then, the design and functionality this phone offers is still a big plus!
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- Background Changer TouchFLO 3D
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- Calendar Panel TouchFLO 3D
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- Delivery Report TouchFLO 3D
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- Home Panel TouchFLO 3D
Wow dude, this is really nice information, thankyou.