Is a smartphone for the masses too lofty a goal? Well, that’s the kind of device HTC hopes its latest handset would be.

The budding Taiwanese-based phone-maker launched the much-anticipated Touch Diamond (picture) in London last week to much fanfare. The device features an overhauled touchscreen interface with slick animations and easy access to multimedia features and call functions. It lets you get online via WiFi or over a cellular network at mobile broadband speeds and has a location-sensing feature that shows you where you are on a virtual map.

“What we’re trying to do is to make the smartphone cool and trendy and make people fall in love with it. Then, we want to simplify usability so the consumer doesn’t need a lot of knowledge to use it,” HTC chief executive Peter Chou said in an interview with TODAY.

The Diamond builds upon technology used in the popular HTC Touch smartphone launched last year. Three million units of the Touch have been sold worldwide so far and Mr Chou expects the Diamond to exceed those numbers.

The brainchild of HTC’s chief innovation officer Horace Luke, the phone was designed by a 40-strong global design team over 18 months. Making products that are “loveable and useable” is the company’s design language, said Mr Luke.

“The overall design in software and hardware, the amount of features in a compact size it’s quite a breakthrough from an engineering point of view,” Mr Luke said. “Our vision was to create a device you could operate with one hand. You can walk down the street with the phone and get on the Internet while carrying a bag.”

Hands-on with the Diamond

The aesthetics are fetching from the shiny front to the unique back sporting angular contours.

As far as first impressions go, the Diamond doesn’t feel “plasticky” or cheap. It has a tough steel frame that’s hard to dent and a durable tempered glass plate for its 2.8-inch touchscreen. It weighs 110g and is 11.33mm thin lighter and thinner than Motorola’s Razr2 clamshell phone.

It runs on a 528MHz Qualcomm processor and is preloaded with Windows Mobile 6.1.

A spiffy interface, dubbed TouchFlo 3D, hides the ugly guts of the operating system with an icon-based interface filled with 3D animations. This lets you scroll through your contacts, pictures and music files Rolodex-style. The phone also has a sensor that rotates the onscreen visuals to landscape or portrait view.

The touchscreen isn’t as responsive as the one on the Apple iPhone but it can sense input from a stylus, skin contact and even your nails. If you often scribble Chinese characters, you might like this.

The tactile buttons on the bottom half provide fast access to basic call functions and the home screen. There’s also a clickable scroll wheel that looks very much like what you can find on an iPod.

The inclusion of the Opera browser on the smartphone allows it to render websites much like how they are viewed on a desktop computer, rather than the watered-down mobile versions that less sophisticated phones offer. The browser even runs Flash, which the iPhone browser currently lacks.

The Diamond has 4GB of internal storage (no memory slots for storage expansion) and an extensive list of connectivity features. The 3.5G phone can hook you up to a mobile broadband network at speeds of up to 7.2 megabits per second. It also has WiFi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth 2.0 and GPS, which lets you locate yourself on the go via Google Maps.

As you use the phone, you’ll notice plenty of other nice touches. For example, you can stitch a panoramic photo quickly and easily on its 3.2-megapixel camera. The stylus is attached magnetically and when you take it out, it wakes the phone up.

Overall, the Diamond seems like a fairly compelling device that might just give theelusive 3G iPhone a run for its money. As consumers wait impatiently for Apple to launch its smartphone here, even with SingTel’s recent announcement, they might just want to consider HTC’s latest gem.

The Diamond, priced at 549 euros ($1,172) in Europe, is expected to be available in Singapore next month. - TODAY/ar