Dries Hoebeke on .NET

New toys for me?!

I guess the thing that pulled me over to “invest” in a smartphone is just that i can’t help myself but to marvel at the technology. I’m such a geek, right.
Of all palm-of-your-hand-computers i chose the HTC Touch Diamond2. I did some research on beforehand and the eventual choice was realy between either the Touch Diamond and the HTC Hero. I won’t bore you with all my reasons as to why i decided this, only this one:
obviously both these devices are pretty similar but for the fact that the Diamond runs on Win Mo 6.1 and the Hero runs on Google’s Android. Since i never been much of a Java man (mostly because my environment didnt realy require it of me) i just went ahead and got the Windows Mobile device. That’s right, i intend to teach myself the ways of mobile application development.

htc touch diamond 2

Description of the hardware:

It’s a pretty thing. Not just to work with but just the object itself looks very sleek and expensive. The back of the device is glossy black with a cutout where the obligate camera lives. The camera is embedded in a little (what looks like) brushed aluminum triangle. I’m a bit concerned about the backpanel, it feels a bit vulnerable and fragile.
On the sides we find on the left side the volume button, this is basically one button which you can push the upper side and the lower side to augment or lower the volume. On the right side there’s nothing to be found.

In the button you’ll find the mini-usb plug, which is also used for the headphones that are delivered with the phone. Next to that there’s the stylus.
Nice to know is that the stylus’s state can be queried programatically. I can image somebody writes an application that warns you if you forget to put the stylus back in.

The power button is situated on top of the Diamond. This button is also used to put the phone back to life after it’s gone in standby mode.

When we behold the surface of the Diamond there’s on top first and indicator led that shows you when there’s a new mail or sms waiting for you or when your device’s battery is loading or loaded. Next to that there’s the speaker. On the right side of the speaker there’s a light sensor. You can use this sensor also programatically (i should write a seperate post about that). And finally next to the sensor there’s a camera that’s primarily used to take pictures of your own geeky face.

The camera itself doesn’t seem to be very awesome. I’ve taking some pictures allready with the default settings and they don’t seem to have very vivid colors.

click Musti to view the full image

Beneath this all there’s ofcourse the touchscreen which i found to be very responsive and not very prone to finger smudge stuff. The screen’s quality, to me, is very good alltough i can’t be very technical about it.

Finally we have a separate zoom bar beneath the screen, a call button, start button, back button and a hang up button.

I will be using this baby the next couple of months as an agenda and also a bit as a camera. I plomise i’ll make a post about how cool it turns out to be.

Bye!

Sources:
photo taken from http://www.letsgodigital.org/