[Touch Diamond, MDA Compact IV General] programatix:
Hi,

I consider myself as a hardcore PPC user. I use my PPC for almost everything and if I ever lost my PPC, I have nothing... well.. but of course I have backup on my laptop.

Battery Life

I use a bluetooth earphone during work, meaning that the bluetooth is turned on on my PPC from 8am to 5pm (discovery off). Before going to work, I spend about 5 to 20 minutes reading internet news via WiFi. Normally when I reached home from work, I have about 10% power left. Without WiFi in the morning, I have about 20% to 25% power left. Well, this is when I was using O2 Xda II mini (HTC Magician) and O2 Atom Life. Believe it or not, when I gave my O2 Xda II mini to my wife, she only need to recharge it after 3 to 4 days of usage, and the same thing happen when I gave her my O2 Atom Life.

Getting my hand on HTC Diamond, well it is the same. It lasted as long as my previous 2 PPCs, except that the battery is smaller, meaning, it actually is better. Since it has built-in GPS, if it is used, of course the battery will die faster, but from my usage, the built-in GPS does not consume more power than the WiFi.

To make it short, the battery life on PPC is based on how long you turned it on (usage time, not standby mode). If it is stated in the specification as 3 hours talk-time, then it will last for 3 hours of usage. That is what people are forgetting. When using other handphone (which are not PPC), people only use it to talk, sms or some gaming. When they switch to PPC, there are so many things that you can do with it and people actually spend more time using it not awaring of the total time used (not standby mode). There is a good software, AE Button Plus, which can measure the uptime for us. It shows the usage time as well.

Volume

All of my PPC has decend volume level, which O2 Atom Life is the lowest. Not sure why because it has 2 speakers (stereo). It should be louder right? But Diamond actually is loader than it. But there seems to be a solution here. In O2 Atom Life, I used the Equalizer to increase the volume. There is none on Diamond but I believe you can find one in this forum.

GPS

I love the GPS, except sometimes the GPS software cannot seem to turn the GPS on (1 out of 10). Need to close the software and reopen. Previously I was using Garmin Mobile 10 (via bluetooth) and comparing with the built-in GPS, the lock-time is very very fast.

With Garmin Mobile 10, I turn it on, get in my car, start the car, then wait from 1 minutes to 3 minutes before it can get a lock. With Diamond's built-in GPS, I open the GPS software, get in my car, start the car and I already has a lock.

The problem now is the slow screen refresh (the time taken to redraw the screen). With my O2 Atom Life, the screen redraw is fast (when I make a turn or the map zoom in or out). With Diamond, when I make a turn, I can see the roads being redraw one by one. If I turn the auto-zoom on (Garmin Mobile XT), it will go black for 1 to 3 seconds before the screen reappear when it tries to zoom in or zoom out.

I believe this has something to do with the display resolution of Diamond, 640x480 compared to 320x240 (on my Atom Life). The higher the resolution, the lower the framerate. Further more Atom Life processor is faster. But comparing to Xda II mini, Xda II mini is a little bit faster (redrawing rate).

Please remember that Diamond has a built-in graphic processor (correct me if I'm wrong). When software make use of this graphic processor, I believe we would not have this problem anymore. Instead, we might get real 3D display.

Overall

Overall, I'm satisfied with my new Diamond but of course I always wanted a longer usage time... so I think I better start looking for HTC Touch Pro. :)