Recently, HTC just announced another extraordinary handset, the HTC Touch Diamond2; the device oozes build quality with the exception of the plastic battery cover. The display is simply stunning and the sensitivity of the resistive display is the nearest thing to capacitive DoubleDT.Com has seen. It is a powerful phone and joy to use too.

Perhaps, the HTC Touch Diamond2 is the best touchscreen smartphone since the Apple iPhone 3G, and in many respects, it pushes the Apple device close for title of “best smartphone of them all”. Obviously, the HTC Touch Diamond2 is the replacement for a smartphone that was introduced last year. While it will have generally the same tablet design as its predecessor, this upcoming Window based smartphone will have a larger, higher-resolution screen.

The HTC Touch Diamond first appeared last summer, and it was widely touted as the closest any Windows Mobile handset had yet come to an Apple iPhone killer. And for the most part, the HTC Touch Diamond lived up to the hype, with its compact size, easy email, impressive touchscreen, distinctive TouchFLO interface, exemplary browser, loads of potential apps thanks to its Windows Mobile base. Even the camera vied with the Apple iPhone’s for crappiness.

The HTC Touch Diamond2 seems like a nice but somewhat uninteresting smartphone. It has some decent features, but there is nothing about it that really grabs the attention. When DoubleDT.Com was checking out this handset, DoubleDT.Com was with a group of editors from variety of gadget-related websites, and few of them gave the HTC Touch Diamond2 a second glance, as they were too busy looking at the HTC Touch Pro2, with its larger display and built-in keyboard.

It did not help that the prototype DoubleDT.Com was looking at used a particularly unattractive grey plastic. Still, this upcoming HTC Touch Diamond2 is a nice improvement over its predecessor. It seems that HTC has put a lot of work into improving the user interface. The lag DoubleDT.Com saw with previous version of TouchFLO 3D appears to be outdated.

The HTC Touch Diamond2, which is the latest incarnation of the HTC Touch Diamond, have a simple table shape that’s focused on its 3.2-inch WVGA (800 by 480 pixel) touchscreen, a jump up from the VGA screen on the original. It also upgrades the camera to 5 megapixels. Moreover, the build quality of the case has also improved, and there are also a few tweaks to the interface, a new zoom bar that works for web and images, improved battery life and upgraded applications. It does not exactly break the mould of the original HTC Touch Diamond, but it offers a very creditable upgrade with improvements in almost every area.

The HTC Touch Diamond2 will debut running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1, but HTC has committed to an upgrade to Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 when this new version is available.

Interestingly, the HTC Touch Diamond2 will use a new version of HTC’s TouchFLO 3D user interface that has been more deeply integrated into Microsoft Windows Mobile to deliver more consistency throughout menus and applications. Focused on making navigation easier with fingertip, HTC’s TouchFLO 3D offers quicker access to messaging, contacts, snapshots, email, music, and weather than Microsoft’s standard user interface.

The hardware at the heart of HTC Touch Diamond2 will be near the high-end: a 528 MHz processor from Qualcomm, 288MB of RAM, and a microSD card slot. There will definitely a GSM version of the HTC Touch Diamond2 with 3G, and a CDMA version with EV-DO is also likely. Both are expected to have Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. Interestingly, unlike its predecessor that chose 4GB of built-in storage over a removable memory card, the upcoming model will have a microSD slot for greater storage capacity.

HTC Touch Diamond2’s Specification:

Read also: HTC Snap: An Ergonomically Designed QWERTY Keypad Smartphone Focused on Messaging

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