[Touch Diamond, MDA Compact IV General] P996:
I own tons of other phones, incl. the iPhone and the Nokia E90 and N95 8GB. I also own the HTC TyTN II and other WM phones like the Samsung i780 or i-mate 9502.

So far, my "top list" includes the Nokia E90, Nokia N95 8GB, iPhone and the new SonyEricsson C902(small, very flat and a marvelous easy to use and fast 5MP camera).

The Touch Diamond leaves mixed feelings. I like Windows Mobile a lot, actually more than Symbian but Symbian is more usable on a daily basis. It is difficult to describe.

The new Touchflo3D GUI for the Touch Diamond is beautiful and in my opinion much nicer than the also fabulous iPhone GUI. Problem with the Touch Diamond: the Touchflo3D GUI doesn't work even close to the way the iPhone GUI works.

HTC started something new, very likekly forced into it by the iPhone hype in the US.

Unfortunately the first Touch was as crappy as can be compared to the iPhone, the touch functionality almost unusable(compared to the iPhone, keep that in mind).

Yes, the Touch Diamond is a beautiful phone and in my opinion better looking than the iPhone. I also like the GUI design of the Touch Diamond much more than the one on the iPhone. Unfortunately this is everything I can say about the Touch Diamond, used on a daily basis and compared to the usability of the iPhone, the Touch Diamond sucks big time, sorry to say that. Yes, I could remove Touchflo3D and the device would be a bit faster(trust me, not by much, I already tried). Where's the point though? I like Touchflo3D...but not how it works(it works crappy, not even close to iPhone touch perfection), I like how it looks(icons, fonts, etc.).

No doubt, the HTC Touch Diamond is an eye catcher and at the first glance, it works very well. The first impression is very wrong however, it isn't much fun to use Touchflo3D on this unit and whoever used an iPhone before, knows what I'm talking about.

Yes, I know that the Touch Diamond display uses a different technology than the one used for the iPhone, allowing the usage of a stylus. Still: if HTC wants to give people an iPhone-like touch usage experience(and from what I can tell, I think they really do), they need to find better solutions.

I paid around 530 EUR for the HTC Touch Diamond. Is it worth it the price tag? Right now, I doubt it. Yes, it looks perfectly built and it is probably the highest quality piece of WM hardware HTC ever built in the past. Everything else, especially the usability is only average and apparently the Touch Diamond doesn't even have Quadband GSM, very strange if i look at the network band settings in my device which even seems to allow to choose UMTS 1700(T-Mobile USA). Maybe HTC just forgot to tweak the OS but it is a pitty that the Touch Diamond doesn't seem to be capable to switch through all those frequency bands.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to bash the Touch Diamond, god forbid.

I bought it though more for my personal amusement(cooked ROMs) than for real daily work.

Many people don't seem to like Touchflo3D and I think they're wrong. This is how the Windows Mobile GUI should look in the first place, we're living in the 21th century for god's sake. I have hopes regarding WM7, lets just hope that hardware manufacturers like Qualcomm or Marvel come up with more powerful solutions at less energy consumption.