Smart Phones of today

Mobile phone technology has brought a revolution in the market. There are smartphones which are not only communication but also computation phones. Apple iPhone 3G is the latest awe-inspiring smartphone and has reached the hearts of maximum people who are attracted and fascinated by its innumerable features. Its contender in the market is Microsoft’s HTC Touch Diamond smartphone. If you are going to ask that which is the one that stands out best can be a bit tough to answer, as both have their own splendid attractions.

Let us discuss on them taking various points into consideration.

1. Dimensions

HTC Touch Diamond 102mm in height is 51mm wide and 11.5mm thick, weighs 110g.
While iPhone 3G is 115.5mm high, 62.1mm wide and 12.3mm thick, weighs 133g.

2. Display

HTC has 2.8 inch wide touch screen. This smartphone basically comes with one key factor of TouchFLO. It is a single touch interface and you can move your finger for various effects. Touch phone also has TouchFLO3D feature which has more graphical ability.
While iPhone 3G has a 3.5 inch multi-touch display. This means that the device supports multiple points of contact on the screen. Multi-touch allows complex applications such as the zooming of web pages with two fingers or dual-directional movement as some applications require.

3. Operating System

HTC Touch Diamond runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional giving it a more user-friendly navigational system. While iPhone 3G runs on OS x which is Apple’s own operating system.

4. Storage Capacity

HTC Touch Diamond has a 4GB of internal flash memory and is also provided with a microSD card slot for expanding memory.
While iPhone 3G comes in 8GB as well as 16GB memory.

5. Camera

HTC Touch Diamond has a 3.2 megapixel camera with the features of auto-focus. It has the accelerometer to view the photos in the landscape style and be browsed through with a tap of the finger. There is also a second camera on the front, a VGA CMOS color camera, for video-calling. It takes time to setup quality shots and has a white balance too high for most shots.
iPhone has the 2.0 megapixel camera with geo-tagging and third party application integration. This smartphone take the best shots in well lit areas but creates issues in low light areas. It does not have flash as well as zooming feature.

6. Media Player

HTC Touch Diamond has An integrated speaker and FM radio feature and the audio player that can play MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, WAV, and AMR-NB formats. The iPhone’s main thrill is indeed the iPod functionality, and with 8GB or 16GB options, that’s a lot of AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 1, 2, and 3), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV. Video formats supported are H.164 video, MPEG4 player etc. In iPhone 3G YouTube application is solidly built, and it runs video quite well.

7. Connectivity

HTC Touch Diamond has 3G HSDPA connectivity, plus integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
While iPhone 3G comes with 3G HSDPA, plus integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

8. GPS

HTC Touch is GPS as well as A-GPS ready phone while iPhone has assisted GPS technology only.

9. Battery Life

HTC Touch Diamond features 270 minutes’ talktime for WCDMA and up to 330 minutes on GSM networks, whereas standby is 396 hours and 285 hours respectively. When video-calling, users will get up to 145 minutes on WCDMA.

In iPhone 3G, you can get up to five hours of talk time using 3G, or 10 hours using 2G, standby is 300 hours, five hours of 3G Internet use and six hours of Wi-Fi internet use, seven hours of video playback and up to 24 hours of audio playback.

Thus it is totally up to you whether you want to buy HTC Touch Diamond which has the camera features. But iPhone wins in the media player features. Both the smartphones are best in their own way.

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Samsung i900 OMNIA

First, the touchscreen. I?m fond of touchscreens, and the OMNIA?s touchscreen is good. It doesn?t come with a stylus (the Samsung people said it will come with a stylus, but the phone does not have a slot for one, so that?s doubtful; they did provide stylus during testing), so you have to use your fingers. The TouchWiz user interface is a Samsung custom UI for Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The icons are large enough so that you can easily point to the right icon. What I like about the custom UI is that Opera Mobile is available as an alternative to IE Mobile. This is a great addition. More on this later. Of course, you can revert to the traditional WinMO UI.

Haptic feedback is available, but I had it turned off, as I find it annoying. Basically, the phone vibrates every time you press an icon. It is not a useless feature, but as I have said, I am annoyed by haptic feedback, and I felt it is a waste of battery.

There is a mouse pointer that is controlled by an optical touch pad below the screen. It is like having a touchpad on a phone. I find it odd, but it has its uses.

The on-screen keyboard remains a lot to be desired; people with large fingers will have to get used to it. The keys are too narrow for the thumbs. That is why I think the lack of stylus is a drawback.

It has an accelerometer on board, so that when you turn the phone, the UI changes its orientation. The orientation can be sluggish when, for example, Opera Mobile is running and showing Plurk in mobile mode, for example. But that is hardware limitation, which is understandable.

Probably one of the best features of the phone is its camera. It has a 5-megapixel camera, though the flash is just LED. It has camera functions that are not found in other camera-enabled phones. For example, you can take a panoramic shot with the phone, and you can stitch up to 8 images for a panoramic shot IN THE PHONE. There are other helpful features for taking shots, and I think some of them are quite useful.

One problem that I had found with OMNIA is that it runs out of memory that fast. For example, using Task Manager, the apps that were currently running were Main Menu and Task Manager, which consumed less than 1MB of memory combined. But when I tried launching Camera, I got the insufficient memory error message. Good luck running the Camera app while Opera Mobile is loaded.

I have not tested the multimedia capabilities of the phone – these features are not on top of my preferences for a phone, and there were no available video files for viewing.

The phone is nice when held, though it is shiny and fingerprint magnet. It does not feel flimsy, and you will not be embarrassed to be seen using it. Heck, I?d want this as a phone, though the lack of stylus and keypad would make me pause.

HTC Touch Diamond

What I like about the HTC Touch Diamond
• At the outset, HTC is already pretty well-known for producing reliable and function-rich PDA phones.
• It looks really sleek, with a glossy piano black surface and, as the tagline proclaims, is ?not too big, not too small?.
• It runs on HSDPA for Internet connectivity and is the fastest you can get on mobile phones right now. I tried it. It?s really fast.
• The interface is kinda like the iPhone. You can use your finger or the attached stylus to grab stuff on/off the screen.
• It has a graphics processor! Which means watching videos on this phone is really sweet.
• When surfing the net, you can zoom in to read passages of text and the phone automatically wraps the text for you so you don?t have to scroll left-right!! And the zooming is instantaneous, no waiting for the browser to reload the page.
• It doesn?t allow external memory but has 4GB of storage, which I think is enough.
• When you?re in a phone conversation and pull out your stylus, the phone automatically displays a notepad so you can take notes.
• It has a built-in Google Maps GPS program so you will never need to get lost again!

What I don?t like about the HTC Touch Diamond
• The interface is kinda sluggish, with a 1-2 second delay, when you navigate the touch screen with your fingers. That problem seems to be minimised when you use the stylus, though.
• HTC claims that it has an intuitive interface that mimics tasks you do daily so you won?t need to read a menu to learn how to use the phone. But I wouldn?t say it?s immediately intuitive. Like, when I wanted to scroll through the phone book to watch the nifty animation, I ended up calling some guy, instead. Then I couldn?t figure out how to stop the call and go back to the phone book.
• It?s too expensive.

TALE OF THE TAPE:

Samsung i900 Omnia

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HTC Diamond Touch is a great device and we?re everything but surprised to see HTC saying the sales projections are on track. HTC CEO Peter Chou has told Digitimes that the company is expected to break their one million Touch Diamond shipment by mid-August. This is about 2 months after HTC start selling the new HTC Touch Diamond. HTC has previously estimated to ship 2-3 millions Touch Diamond in this year.

As a sidenote, it took HTC about five months to ship one million HTC Touch devices. It?s still not Apple, which sold 1 million iPhones 3G for a weekend, but they?re working on it. Keep up the pace folks, you?re onto something!

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