Photos: HTC Touch Diamond2 hands-on

Coming to the UK within the next two months, HTC's Touch Diamond2 is, as only grade-A idiots will fail to conclude themselves, the follow-up to the original Touch Diamond -- a business phone that scored a very average 5.9 when we reviewed it last June.

Andrew 'mobile apps are the future' Lim criticised it for running a difficult OS (WinMo 6.1) and for being sluggish to respond to touch. Has HTC fixed these issues?

Well, yes and no. But mostly no. The Diamond2 still runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and it uses the same TouchFLO user interface that hampered the original. But it is "Windows Mobile 6.5-ready," according to an HTC rep, so perhaps expect a 6.5 version towards the end of the year.

It still uses the flexy, resistive breed of touchscreen (which we hate) and comes with a stylus (which all humanity loathes), but it's not quite as flexible a screen as most resistive screens. A capacitive touchscreen would've had us throwing our hands in the air like we all kinds of didn't care.

Other features of this admittedly gorgeous handset include an autofocusing 5-megapixel camera (though still no flash), a super-crisp 81mm (3.2-inch) 800x480-pixel display, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, a 528MHz CPU, and a poor 512MB of internal memory, expandable with microSD (the first Diamond had 4GB internally).

A useful new feature groups together all texts, emails and data from a specific contact -- say, your girlfriend -- accessible by clicking on a picture of their face. We've got pictures of this overleaf.

In conclusion, the Diamond2 is a sure step up from the first model, but only on a small staircase. It has a snappier interface and even better specs, but if it really wanted to win our approval for being gorgeous on the inside and on the outside, it would need a capacitive touchscreen, more internal memory and Windows Mobile 6.5 faster than you can say 'more pics over the next few pages'.

More pics over the next few pages.

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