My Digital Life

Yesterday I got a HTC Touch Diamond to play with for a few days.  I’ve been wanting to see one in the flesh for a while, partly because I need a new phone, and partly because we’re a Windows Mobile house here and with the 3G iPhone looming we’re thinking hard about future direction.

The Diamond… well it’s a sight to behold.   The phone itself is tiny, with sharp styling and is very lightweight.  One comment I heard yesterday was that it makes any phone you sit it next to look 10 years old.  I like the look of it a lot.  The rear surface (as you’ve probably seen in photos) isn’t flat, it has slightly raised jagged pattern that makes it look like it’s been cut from stone, or well… diamond.

The small size of the device poses some interesting question.  Previously WM Smartphones used to be the smaller option, sacrificing the touch screen for a smaller footprint.  Now however, this full WM device with all the GPS and stuff is small enough that it doesn’t matter.  I’m not sure what future the Smartphone OS has if devices are now this small.

Powering the thing up, the first think I noticed was the quality of the screen, off hand I’m not sure what the resolution is, but I’ve seen desktop LCD monitors with worse picture quality, it’s very very good.  This allows the interface to use small, sharp fonts without them being hard to see or use. 

The main ‘home screen’ interface is miles ahead of any other Windows Mobile phone I’ve used (and that’s quite a few!).  At the bottom there’s a scroll bar of buttons for the main functions (contacts, photos, music, settings etc) that is easy to use and and quite intu itive once you realise it’s there.  You just move your finger across the screen until you reach what you want, for example photos, the bulk of the screen is used to show previews that you can then scroll through.  It’s all great looking and reasonably well thought out.

In fact, in terms of the user interface I’d say the worst thing was the underlying Windows OS.  Once you find a function or task that isn’t covered by the HTC installed user interface, the jolt of going back to the old Windows Mobile interface is quite shocking.  I’ve always got on quite well with WM before, but the Diamond really does highlight that MS need to start concentrating on the ‘Mobile’ part of their OS not the ‘Windows’ part.  The normal windows like GUI just doesn’t cut it in the mobile space anymore.

Would I buy one?  Not sure… If there wasn’t a 3G iPhone just days away then yes, without a doubt.  As it is I’ll wait and see.

Like quite a few people I tend to keep my personal and work identities slightly separate, and part of that has been maintaining a domain for email - and more recently this blog. 

Back when I had a bit more time (and spare cash!) for geekery I used to maintain an Exchange server at home, mainly so I could learn about exchange but also to make use of webmail.  These days I don’t bother and have just been using the POP mailboxes provided by my hosting company and Outlook.  The problem is now I’m spending more of my time mobile I really miss having a decent webmail service.  Especially since I’ve been messing around with Exchange 2007 at work, the freebie ones the host provides just don’t cut it.

Having done a bit of digging around the web this morning I found the Windows Live Admin Centre, or what used to be called Custom Domains.  Now perhaps this is something everyone knows about, but its new to me and I’m pretty impressed.  I’ve not tried it out yet, but according to this wiki article once I sign up it’ll let me point my domains MX records at the Hotmail mail servers and have my email delivered to Hotmail accounts for my domain.  Sounds like a great solution to me, I can still use Outlook at home and get a decent webmail interface for when I’m mobile somewhere.  I’ll be trying it out over the next few days to see how well it works.