Our final reportage spotlighting the release of the revolutionary Touch Diamond handset is devoted to the speeches delivered by the representatives of the partner companies assisting HTC in the distribution of the new handset. The most part of the stage belonged to Peter Chou and Horace Luke which were brought up to the microphone after a brief introductory speech delivered by Florian Seiche. About a hundred of newsmen from all kinds of media attended the presentation, of which about forty were of the local British origin. The Russian delegation was probably the most impressive among the rest of foreign visitors – the representatives of whole three periodicals were present, one of them being Smape.com.

After the HTC representative spoke, their partners came up the stage to tell the attending reporters about peripheral work surrounding the promotion campaign of Diamond, mainly touching upon the principal points of collaboration between the companies. The Microsoft corporation was represented by Andy Lees which made a strong focus on the fact that HTC holds a leading position on the market of WM mobile products, five of which have hit the platinum sales chart, meaning that each of them sold in a number of copies above one million. The latest of them, Touch, scored total sales surpassing three million copies. According to Andy Lees, this is an astonishing achievement considering that a total of 11 million WM handsets of all models comprised together were sold over the last year.

According to Microsoft, by June the total sales of WM handsets should exceed twenty million copies. Over the last year, the market volume has doubled in the sector, so the overall increase in this year will be even larger. As it was noted by Andy Less, the last quarter's number of sold WM handsets has beaten Apple's lifetime iPhone sales. Making no pauses, the Microsoft representative went on with telling about the advantages of Diamond, seemingly meaning it as a perfect alternative to Apple's competing bestseller. A very remarkable moment, for Microsoft have been reluctant to speak about iPhone under any circumstances and omitted any comparisons… before.

Andy Lees' speech was over after he shared his personal experiences of handling the new devices, underlining the high ergonomics of the new TouchFLO 3D user interface. An interesting forecast was made – as predicted by the Microsoft representative is destined to become one of, if not the most and only, innovative solutions of 2008.

Olaf Swantee took the stage over from Florian Seiche, starting exploring Orange's plans on future collaboration with HTC. The prospected scale of joint operation is, so to say, cynically large: embracing Great Britain by June, then spreading over to France, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and so on, all by the end of 2008.

The collaboration originated in 2002 with the launch of the Orange SPV smartphone, at the same time a special interface providing a full compatibility with the carrier's content download options was out of the lab and made it to the final products, making part of their software platform. Nowadays, more than 27 million of annually sold handsets of this product family have at least 80% of the overall number carry this software as part of the preinstalled package, Diamond being no exception. As predicted by Orange, the new model propels the collaboration only further, providing great benefits to both sides due to its growing popularity fueled by the availability of the revolutionary 3D interface and a quick Web access and data transfer capability.

A total of four Orange-exclusive applications will ship as part of Diamond's default software package. The Photo suite will let the user upload all kinds of photos to the web sources. Music offers more than a million audio tracks to be downloaded. Downloads provides access to innumerable ringtones and similar mobile content. Mobile TV effectively stands for 61 channels and 3000 videos on demand. Everything is integrated into the framework of a secure billing system. 

Some of the press representatives present inquired about the maximum lifetime. As stated by the HTC representatives, a large-scale effort was invested into optimizations, so the cut in the battery capacity won't tell on the maximum uptime hours. For instance, WM 6.1 proves to stay alive some 20% longer than the previous version due to a new CPU handling mode.

As for the sales forecasts, Peter Chou predicts a new blockbuster – regardless of the much higher price, Diamond will presumably beat even Touch's record of popularity, scoring more than 3 million of copies sold worldwide. Time will tell, and a full detailed review of HTC Touch Diamond is just coming down the river in the few following days at Smape.com.