Smartphone Thoughts: Fight Night 2008: Diamonds vs. Androids

Closing Thoughts
The HTC Touch Diamond is slick and pretty but the fact of the matter is Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional is just downright torturous to use, at least for me. Sure it works, but working and being usable are two totally separate things. For starters, for the life of me I could not get the darn alarm on this device to snooze this morning. No matter what I pressed or where I tapped/slapped/hit/screamed at, it would not be quiet! I eventually had to navigate to the alarm system menu and uncheck the alarms I set just to get them to shut up. Now granted, it would have probably been easy as pie to figure this out if it wasn't 6AM, but when it is that early in the morning and you're half awake in a pitch black room, is it too much to ask for a few brightly colored giant buttons that say "snooze" and "dismiss?"

I just do not understand why you can press a slew of buttons on the Windows Mobile Standard side to shush your device when it is annoying you but you can't do the same thing in the Professional version. This right here is one of the biggest flaws with Windows Mobile. Even experienced users cannot easily transition from one platform to the other. You would think some project manager over there in Microsoft would have thought that it would be a good idea to make these operating systems more similar than different, but apparently they decided to spend all their time making incredibly small and unusable check boxes and "OK" buttons in the top right hand corner of the screen. Smooth move Microsoft!

Now the T-Mobile G1 isn't perfect by a long shot. For starters, there is no Exchange support which means I had to import all of my contacts from Outlook to Gmail via a CVS export. Not to terrible, but extremely annoying. Also if I want "push" email, I have to use a Gmail account... which is stupid since it doesn't really push at all but that doesn't stop T-Mobiles staff from telling people it does. There is however an application that will allow you to sync your Exchange contacts with Gmail but no matter how I set it up, it tells me my username and password is wrong - which they are not. My guess is this is because my Exchange server isn't the Exchange 2007. Also from what I can tell, there is no task manager at all. The Android platform is suppose to manage all of your system resources for you since consumers do not want to mess around with that kind of stuff... but not including a task manager that can allow you to kill an application on an open source platform where a lot of the applications I have downloaded and tried are fairly buggy and crazy and cause the device to slow down or the application to crash just seems downright stupid. Sure, it is an open source platform so someone will build a task manager eventually, but you would think due to the nature of the device and the encouragement of tinkering with it that they would provide you with a kill switch to save yourself from something stupid that you might do.

Google does have the upper hand in building their operating system from scratch with current advances in technology and design in mind so companies such as HTC do not have to put together brand new resource intensive user interfaces to have the deal with the dated user experience of the Windows Mobile Professional operating system. Once again I pray to the Windows Mobile 7 Powers That Be to please step up to the plate and do something, anything, to make windows Mobile Professional easier to use. I just don't understand how Microsoft can create something that is fun to use like Windows Mobile Standard and completely fail on the touch screen aspect of it. The differences in usability between the Standard and Professional platform is just confusing. Would it really be that hard to integrate the research that was used to make the Standard platform usable and easy to manage with one hand into the Professional platform? They’re based off the same base code for Pete's sake! Why do they have to be so different?!

Like I mentioned before, I haven't had that much time to really sit around and play with both devices, but from what I have seen, even with the flaws that are currently present, the T-Mobile G1 just feels like a more put together operating system and is way more polished usability wise than the HTC Touch Diamond, which makes me really sad since I have been pining over the HTC Touch Diamond since after it was released. The HTC Touch Diamond feels like a sandwich with way to many ingredients stacked on top of each other and spilling over the edge. It is still an incredibly tasty sandwich but it is just too messy for me to want to eat everyday for lunch. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Microsoft addresses all of these problems with Windows Mobile 7, but I am not holding my breath. In the meantime, I do plan on keeping my water damaged Blackjack around as I really love the Windows Mobile Standard platform.

Oh and I almost forgot - the HTC Touch Diamond is a smudge magnet. You can't even look at this device without it smudging up somehow. That might not be important to some users, but if you hate smudges with all of your heart like I do this could be a huge deal breaker for you.

Rocco Augusto is the Managing Editor of Smartphone Thoughts and owns and operates Skimbee Studios - a small Web Development studio based out of Portland, OR. When Rocco is not up to his elbows in gadgets and technology, you can usually find him trying to keep up with his incredibly peppy and energenic daughter who he has lovingly given the nickname of "Tiny Tornado."