By shelling Diamond out to the market, HTC brings down a heavy blow on E-TEN and Gigabyte products, making the third largest VGA PDA manufacturer of the American and European market. However it's not a single selling point that makes the deal and day in this case – but rather the whole complex impression that the new product produces. Complexity without concessions or compromises is probably Diamond's most notable hallmark. The device comes with a an accelerometer, a brand new "finger-fit" interface and a lot of other features, going as far as a magnet-powered stylus holder which looks exactly like the charger slot of certain Apple laptops.

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Becoming the new technological leader, HTC makes no tries to reinvent the wheel, rather sticking to time-proven yet not outdated technologies given a fashionable wrapping and an advanced implementation. No other WM PDA has previously been known to combine such a marvelous set of features, so we think Diamond is a serious claim for customer audiences outside the traditional target public to which all the previous solutions by HTC were designed to cater. A similar thing happened with the Touch handset last year – the new product quickly became a bestseller (more than 3,000,000 copies have been sold so far) and achieved recognition among people who hardly were previously aware of Microsoft's mobile solutions. It reminds us of the way that Symbian (both S60 and UIQ alike) devices passed through, HTC now making the first and very successful step to follow.

Currently HTC is the only company which has had some luck on the risky grounds of successful product promotion outside the target audience. Strongly accented selling points of the Touch device helped it to attain high sales levels in multiple regions, leaving E-TEN and ASUS far behind. We guess this gap will be opening even further in this year due to E-TEN's market failures in early 2008 – after the deficit of 2007-m, now the retailers are packed tight with the brand's unsold handsets with no single expert claiming any chance for this stock to get sold at least partially within the foreseeable future. ASUS are experiencing problems of another kind – yet the result is virtually the same, namely the company's inability to pose any considerable competition to HTC.

Doubtlessly Diamond will sell in numbers hitting all known sales records, not least due to such an important cause as HTC's recent decision to revise their pricing policy. The top-ranking piece of novelty will sell for no more than 600 euros. Reflecting on prices asked for this kind of products through the last year, a very considerable difference becomes obvious. Shorter delivery terms will be the last trump in HTC's hands to give their wondrous brainchild a quick and astonishing launch, - the model is expected to start selling from retailers by June in Europe and Asia and a few weeks later in the rest of the world, - nothing like E-TEN's infamous, ever-plaguing delivery lags is going to happen. By the way, being the ODM producer of the much talked of Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, HTC are planning to introduce an analog of their own, currently codenamed Raphael – a QWERTY slider based off Diamond.

The parallels with Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 are by no chance accidental, the common points being a closely analogous stuffing and a slightly lower price due to the product's positioning outside the premium segment. The latter tells on the material quality and the kind of people most likely to be attracted by such an offer, i.e. the target audience is a bit different. First of all, it's a powerful fashion product, though not a premium one. That's the way HTC artificially increases the distance between two technically close products which are meant to be given a little more differentiation. The Diamond handset looks as if it wanted to be Nokia Prism's sidekick, which is a rather fresh touch on a PDA's design. In real life it makes even more impression than in the pictures… the casing is entirely composed of high-quality plastic with a few pieces of soft-touch coating. The handset's actual dimensions and weight go against the reason which would suggest rather massive values for such a powerful hardware platform, though Diamond is in fact almost slim and relatively light-weight.

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The TouchFLO 3D enhanced graphical interface stands among the most prominent selling points for this device. Diamond is the world's first mobile communication device with a fully animated 3D interface, this sensational fact often leaving unnoticed the handset's status of world's first PDA powered by Windows Mobile 6.1. A separate article will be devoted entirely to all the exclusively new and updated features of the device's software platform, and for the time being here's some real life footage of TouchFLO 3D seen in action for the Smape.com visitors:

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The featured video clip gives provides you with a pretty picture of how Diamond looks in real life. Due to its very plasticky nature, the handset easily accumulates grease and fingerprints, but the material quality itself leaves no way for reproaches. The dimensions are quite surprising for such a powerful mobile, we wondered how the developers managed to stuff the average-sized handset with such a lot of things. The interface, of course, is the most impressive of all the features. Associations are involuntarily invoked with iPhone, at the same time the dedicated graphics processing chip integrated into Diamond helps the graphical shell work even faster.

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A few live photos:

Shortly we'll publish a detailed article covering every aspect of HTC's revised marketing policy, including an interview with a HTC representative and an account of our personal experiences with THC Touch Diamond. Stay tuned!

Author: Dmitry Ryabinin, dm@smape.com

SMAPE.com

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