HTC Can’t Disguise Windows Mobile Flaws
Cramped Keyboard, Touch Capabilities Mar Sleek Software
New iPhone competitors continue to crop up, though most are mobile devices from companies that simply slap on a touch screen in hopes of fooling consumers. The real key to the iPhone’s success is its software, and finally, signs indicate that other companies are starting to pay more attention to making good software to go along with their hardware.
One welcome sign is an effort by companies trying to improve Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile operating system, which has a reputation for confusing navigation and hasn’t had a major update recently. Kinoma Inc., for example, recently released an application called Kinoma Play that runs on Windows Mobile devices and gives users a markedly better way of handling photos, videos, music and Web browsing.
The HTC Touch Diamond, due out this month from Sprint, tries to hide Windows Mobile software.
This week, I tried yet another software program that is designed to run on top of Windows Mobile software. But this time, the software is at the heart of a device designed by the same company: HTC Inc. I tested the HTC Touch Diamond, due out from Sprint (S) sometime this month for $250 (after a $100 mail-in rebate) with a two-year contract.
Taiwan-based HTC started out in 1998 as a maker and designer of mobile devices for other companies. A year ago, HTC launched the first device under its own name in the U.S., and now, Sprint, AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (DT) sell HTC-branded devices. The Diamond incorporates HTC software, as well as software from Sprint, MobiTV, TeleNav and others. But it isn’t a stretch to imagine HTC trying to create a fully end-to-end model (hardware and all software) in the future.
The Diamond has a touch screen, but it’s smaller than Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone — 2.8 versus 3.5 inches. This screen lacks the iPhone’s multitouch functionality, and its smaller size robs space used for touch gestures like flicking or scrolling with a finger. Yet like the iPhone, it relies solely on an on-screen keyboard for all text entries. Even with the Diamond’s stylus, the keyboard felt small and cramped. Using just your fingertips was next to impossible.
After using the Diamond for a week, I can say that despite its handsome TouchFLO 3D software and animated icons like photos that flip from one to the next with a flick of finger, this device failed to disguise the frustrating interface of Windows Mobile often enough for my taste.
It reminded me of the brown paper bag book covers my Dad helped me make for schoolbooks when I was a kid: They looked great on the outside, felt sturdy and clean and created a blank canvas for homemade doodles that were often more interesting to me than the books they covered. But my book covers couldn’t change what was underneath; pages of frustrating algebra were just a flip away.
HTC’s sleek software tries to hide Windows Mobile, but menus from the Microsoft operating system are constantly popping up. HTC’s email program, for example, is represented by an animated envelope icon that, when selected, cleverly flips twice before sliding an email message half-way out and giving you a three-line peek at what’s inside. If only reading and responding to email were half as entertaining. Selecting the animated envelope opens the old, cumbersome Windows Mobile email program.
Also, the touch capabilities of the Diamond’s screen didn’t work as well as they should. Finger flicks that should have scrolled through lists instead seemed to select individual items in a list, as if they were sticky.
The Diamond isn’t all bad, of course. Plenty of people will like its smaller size because the iPhone and RIM’s (RIM) BlackBerrys seem too large and brick-like to hold up to an ear for phone calls. Next to my BlackBerry Curve, the Diamond was of comparable thickness but measured smaller in width and length.
Despite its size, the Diamond is packed with features. It has a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus that doubles as a camcorder, and comes with four gigabytes of internal memory and a removable battery. I taped short videos — something the iPhone can’t do — and found the sound and video footage to be adequate.
HTC touts the Diamond’s browser, which is based on the Opera browsing engine but is designed for HTC. It opens Web pages in views that fit the screen and text is automatically resized as users zoom in or out, though this resizing was sometimes slow.
Unlike the iPhone, Web sites that are opened on the Diamond’s browser don’t resemble the actual site as you would see it on your computer. I opened CNN.com (TWX) and WSJ.com (NWS), two sites that are packed with text and graphics on a regular browser. On the Diamond, they quickly were rendered in list format with mostly text-only. I easily touched the screen to follow links to full stories.
Like the iPhone, the Diamond has an accelerometer, though it’s called the “G-Sensor.” When it worked, this feature flipped the screen to match the horizontal or vertical direction in which the device was being held. Photos flipped instantly, but the Diamond’s G-Sensor took almost three full seconds to respond as I flipped from vertical to horizontal while using the browser. And some Web sites didn’t respond to the G-Sensor flips at all.
A special YouTube application developed by HTC was easy to find on the device and worked quickly. My videos were organized into categories for All, History, Bookmarks and Search, though this last category required using the finger-fumbling keyboard. In one step, I emailed a link from a YouTube video to a friend using the device, with a still shot from the video included in the message.
Overall navigation on the Diamond isn’t as intuitive as on the iPhone or iPod Touch, nor was it as easy as on a touch-screen Windows Mobile device running the Kinoma Play application. The iPhone and iPod Touch use quick double-taps on touch screens to zoom in or out, and multitouch capabilities resize images with pinching gestures; Kinoma Play uses a long touch to zoom in. The Diamond used double tapping on some screens, but not enough for me to grow comfortably reliant on it. A small, circular pad beneath the device’s touch screen provided a more dependable method for zooming in or out of screens: tracing the perimeter of this circle clockwise with a finger zoomed in; counterclockwise zoomed out.
The HTC’s software animation is put to good use on its Weather screen. Here, animated illustrations of each day’s weather appear on the screen: suns spin, clouds move in, rain appears to fall. Even moons appear on the device at night to accurately reflect the weather in a city at a specific time.
It is exciting to think about other mobile-phone companies giving better software a real try, especially those that attempt to improve Windows Mobile. But HTC’s Touch Diamond doesn’t hide the outdated operating system well enough or often enough for a user to want to buy a whole new mobile device.
Edited by Walter S. Mossberg
- Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com
Comments
HA! Love the bookcover story.
But your first sentence says it all. My advice to the cell phone companies: Close up shop for the next two years. No new products, you are just wasting your time.
Go into heavy R&D mode. You know, the research and development you should have been doing while Apple was working on the iPhone.
Oh… and don’t count on a company like Microsoft to do the heavy lifting for you, otherwise you are stuck waiting for them to resolve issues and you have no competitive advantage over other MS toolkit users. Get your hands dirty at he lower levels, start with Android or some other Open Source base.
Oh, you didn’t set aside money for such a massive effort?
Too bad. What were you thinking?
Posted by Mac Beach at September 3rd, 2008 at 6:53 pmI fail to understand why the keyboard is a negative issue with this phone. Consider that many other keyboards can be easily installed to WM devices. Skins can even be applied to get an identical look to the iphone keyboard.
Posted by john smith at September 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pmOh my god! When will people stop comparing this with the iphone. It seems that every device that has a touch screen has to be compared. Apple were not the first into the touchscreen phone market. What HTC are doing is a natural progression from what they used to provide. Windows may be a little sluggish at times, but at least there are thousands of pieces of compatible programs for it, unlike the jesus phone.
Posted by paul welbourn at September 4th, 2008 at 1:36 amGreat review. Have been testing the phone a little and feel the same: HTC’s UI touches are nice, but the Windows Mobile core is very outdated.
To the commenters who don’t understand how a market works: *OF COURSE* she should be comparing this phone to the iPhone — anyone buying it will be. It’s not favoritism or payola to repeatedly point out that Apple’s software is far ahead of other mobile phone makers’ — it’s a fact.
Not sure if Sprint will be able to sell this phone in great volume at $350/$250 after rebate, in the era of a $199 iPhone, or even next to a $129 Samsung Instinct. Are there enough Windows Mobile devotees left?
Posted by Dan Frommer at September 4th, 2008 at 5:12 amThis review is incomplete. I used this phone and the keyboard and Internet is not as you described. Windows mobile is not broken just because it doesn’t look “new” or pretty. Windows mobile is has way more functionality than the iPhone. If you are going to compare this phone to the iPhone you must compare all parts not just the bad ones from this phone and the good ones from the iphone. For example the iphone cost less at first but in the long run the iPhone will cost more to own becuase of your plan. Also sprint has a faster network and is more spread around the us ATT 3G is non-existent in may states. I could go on and on but thats not my job it’s yours.
Posted by Jose Cerna at September 4th, 2008 at 9:05 amThe iphone has complaints that include: uncomfortably warm, programs crash, and it so seldom connects to AT&T’s speedier third-generation, or 3G. All this for an intuitive flare that makes slow learners giddy. Windows Mobile is business integration on a PDA point blank. The HTC has many more features than described in your article. It’s unfortunate you failed to give an unbiased review of a phone thats going to push cellular phones to the next level, and yes that includes the “jesus”. WHY NO MENTION OF THE SMART SYLUS!!!!!!
Posted by Dave Massary at September 4th, 2008 at 9:25 amWhile each phone has its good and bad points, I think its really easy to see which commenters — just do not like Apple and the iPhone.
People that “count” features so they know which is better…. well, I say have fun. :-( The thing that I hear OVER and OVER is that people had other phones but COUlD NOT USE those features. It was too hard. PERIOD. The iPhone made using those features friendly. PERIOD.
That is what this article is about. USING a phone, not just pimping one. Hey, my best phone was one simple, NO camera, no nothing phone. It was just a small simple easy to use phone. When it died, I looked around and found that for the same price, a camera phone with music….. well the iPhone beat every other one.
But for JUST a simple phone, …. I still like my old (and now mostly dead :-) ) phone. Oh well.
N.
Posted by elder norm at September 4th, 2008 at 11:46 amI am actually a bit of an Apple fanboy, having owned Macs since 1984, but I currently use a Windows Mobile device (Moto Q) and do not find the WM interface and OS so awful. I suppose as a point of reference I also did not find high school Algebra to be frustrating with or without bookcovers.
Apple has shown that great software makes a huge difference, but I do not agree with the tone of the review that implies that any manufacturer that uses the WM OS should pack it in since there is no way they can create a compelling alternative to the iPhone.
Katherine noted in the review that:
“Unlike the iPhone, Web sites that are opened on the Diamond’s browser don’t resemble the actual site as you would see it on your computer. I opened CNN.com and WSJ.com, two sites that are packed with text and graphics on a regular browser. On the Diamond, they quickly were rendered in list format with mostly text-only. I easily touched the screen to follow links to full stories.”
From my experience with Opera Mobile, the user has the option in Opera’s preferences to select having the browser “tell” the website that the device is a mobile device or a desktop. Opera Mobile defaults, I believe, to mobile web. This is probably why the reviewer saw a mobile version of CNN and the WSJ sites rather than the “desktop” version. Since I have not seen the HTC Diamond version of Opera Mobile I cannot say for certain that this alternative viewing option is available, but I would guess that it is. Neither am I sure if this option of viewing the faster loading mobile versions of sites is available under the iphone’s web browser. Does anyone know about this?
Another thing that I think was overlooked in the review is that the resolution of the Diamond’s display is VGA (640×480). This is twice the pixel count of the iPhone’s very highly rated display (480×320). If it is a smaller form factor than the iPhone’s screen as she mentioned then the resolution on the Diamond must be really crisp.
I am dying to take a look at a Diamond or Touch Pro. I am also curious how long before the hacking crowd figures a way to install Android on these phones.
Posted by Kevin McConnaughey at September 5th, 2008 at 11:11 amNowadays the mobile communications market expects innovation and not just improvement. Small changes won’t achieve the big sales necessary to create a new product line, rather than a one-hit wonder.
Posted by Ken Okel at September 5th, 2008 at 7:37 pm“Even with the Diamond’s stylus, the keyboard felt small and cramped. Using just your fingertips was next to impossible.”
…at least on my Diamond there’s 4 different keyboard layouts to choose from — Phone Keypad, Compact QWERTY, Full QWERTY and the normal WM Keyboard. The two first are extremely suitable for tapping with your finger, the two latter work better with the stylus. Plus it has handwriting recognition too! As far as I know there’s only one type of keypad on the iPhone, or?
“The iPhone and iPod Touch use quick double-taps on touch screens to zoom in or out, and multitouch capabilities resize images with pinching gestures”
…and my Diamond uses double taps too. But instead of pinching gestures you zoom in and out with a circular movement on the screen = only one finger needed. Or you can use the circular pad beneath the screen. So what’s there to complain about?
AND: my Diamond can send and receive MMS, copy-paste text between applications, shoot videos, do video calls, save and edit attachments and use Bluetooth for file transfers. Furthermore, you can buy it unlocked, while the iPhone comes with a two year contract. Okay, it’s a bit pricey, 600 euros in my country, but it’s well worth the money!
Posted by word ord at September 9th, 2008 at 10:33 amWhere can you get the skins that look like the ihone for the keyboard? attn john smith
Posted by Shemicka Johnson at September 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 am