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

Pocket-size digital cameras keep getting slimmer and more powerful, with larger viewing screens and added features. But there are some trade-offs. For instance, the optical viewfinder has largely disappeared from these models, as bigger and bigger screens have claimed more of the limited real estate available.

This week, we took a look at three pocket-size models that will hit shelves next month. They are the Olympus Stylus 710 and the Nikon Coolpix S5, each $350, and the $400 Canon PowerShot SD630.

These cameras are impressively svelte. All three are less than four inches in length, a little more than two inches wide and only four-fifths of an inch thick. The Olympus weighs in at just 3.6 ounces, the Nikon at 4.8 ounces and the Canon at 5.11 ounces.

Yet they all have plenty of power to take very good pictures. The Nikon and the Canon boast a maximum resolution of six megapixels, while the Olympus can reach 7.1 megapixels. That means all three can take images that can fill a large, high-resolution computer screen or be blown up to large sizes when printed. Each has a 3X optical zoom.

The Nikon and the Olympus, which feature curved or tapered bodies, have 2½-inch screens. The Canon, which is squarer, squeezes in a three-inch screen. In our tests, all the screens remained usable, if somewhat washed out, in bright sunlight. But only one of the cameras, the Olympus, has any form of image stabilization, which can prevent blurring of photos caused by a slight shaking of the camera when holding it at arm’s length to frame a shot using the screen.

Two of the three models, the Nikon and the Canon, offered iPod-like navigation controls: dials or wheels that scrolled through menus and photos. The Nikon S5’s wheel has tiny ridged marks for easier turning and can also be pressed down in three places. Canon calls the SD630’s wheel a touch control dial — it doesn’t physically turn but instead comes to life when your thumb rests on it, displaying an on-screen icon of the dial and its functions.

We tested the three cameras indoors and out, at parks and shops and in houses and offices. We found all three easy to use and got good pictures from each. But we preferred the photos from the Canon and Nikon to those from the Olympus. The Olympus seemed weaker at handling dark areas and shadows in our outdoor tests, and its indoor flash pictures were too washed out. The Canon and Nikon pictures seemed about equal outdoors, but the Canon was slightly better at indoor flash shots.

Overall, we preferred the Canon. In addition to its superior pictures and larger screen, the Canon had a much cleaner user interface than the others. Many things about the Canon felt more like a tiny computer than a digital camera. Selecting an option, such as no flash, automatically moved that icon from the center to the edge of your screen. And when the touch control dial was used, the function upon which your thumb was hovering would suddenly be magnified on the viewing screen.

Also, when viewing images in playback mode, the Canon automatically rotates them if you merely turn the camera vertically or horizontally.

Our first impression of using the Nikon Coolpix S5 was how quiet it was. It turns on almost unnoticeably and zooms in and out without much sound at all — quite a switch from the typical whir of most zoom lenses. Unlike the Canon and Olympus lenses, the S5’s lens doesn’t protrude from the camera, even when zooming.

A special portrait button is positioned on the top ridge of the Coolpix S5 so that whenever you’re taking pictures of people, which happens often, you can press that button and automatically set the camera for the best portrait results. A Mode button on the back of the camera generates a circular on-screen image labeled with eight different modes, and the scroll wheel easily navigates around these options.

The Nikon also has some nice features, including a special setting that can combine 10 of your pictures into a little movie, complete with music. Unfortunately, you can’t play back these movies on a computer — they only play on the camera itself or on a TV using included AV wires. Nikon also provides an adapter that allows the S5 to dock with Kodak’s EasyShare printers. But, in our tests, the Kodak printer couldn’t locate the pictures stored in the Nikon.

One big downside of the Nikon: It’s the only camera in this group that requires a cradle to connect to a computer or TV. The others can be connected from ports right on the camera body.

The Olympus Stylus 710 has the best combination of specs and weight among the three. For instance, in its continuous-shooting mode, it can take 3.7 frames per second, versus a bit more than two frames for the other cameras.

But its user interface seemed old and clumsy, and its picture quality fell short in our tests. Also, the Olympus uses the oddball xD storage cards, rather than the more common SD cards found in the Canon and the Nikon.

The Stylus 710 offers 23 different scene modes, including such specifics as Night + Portrait, Self Portrait, Fireworks and Cuisine. But we were dubious about who would take the time to choose the correct scene setting before taking a picture. We tested a few of these scene-specific settings, including one called Night Scene, but we waited a full five seconds for our photo to appear on the screen after it was captured. When it was displayed, it looked blurry.

Without a clever scroll wheel, like those found on the Nikon and Canon, the Olympus was more of a pain to use. For example, when we looked through the 23 scene options, we had to press down the control arrow 23 times. Scrolling would have been nicer.

Each of these cameras has its strengths, but we like the Canon SD630 best in this group, followed closely by the Nikon Coolpix S5.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com