Diamond Reviews

[thundrbird1]

I have been in the PPC scene for some time now, beginning with the 6700 and now back to the Diamond after saying that I would never leave the Blackberry community. The phone right out of the box leaves alot to be desired, performance wise that is. But once this bad boy is flashed with a custom rom,,look out. A sleek and small enough phone with iphone resolutions and responsiveness.

Yes, even with customs roms you're bound to run into glitches, but overall this device is an excellent mixture of PDA and phone all in one.

Peace!

[tomemail]

Hello all you Diamonds...

I was a Touch, Mogul, BlackBerry Pearl, Touch Pro and now a Diamond.

Wierd huh?

I liked most of the Pro, but I didn't utilize the sliding keyboard at all. The ear speaker was very crackly/tinny/distorted whatever you want to say. It really didn't matter what volume setting it was on.

The back cover and build quality in general good at all.

The diamond, so far, after 3 days, has great battery life, build quality is great and it is much thinner and lighter feeling than the pro. It feels almost as small as some of the new larger Razers that some in my company have. Before you say anything, I know the razors are thinner, but there isn't a big difference in the pocket.

So far I love it!

[stJamesG]

Previous phone: Mogul

I've spent 2 weeks with the Diamond so far. Initially I wasn't comforatable with the TouchFlo3D interface. Now I like it quite a bit. Other things I like abou the Diamond:

+ increased RAM
+ excellent screen resolution
+ excellent camera/video quality (MUCH better than the Mogul)
+ less lag time (relative to the Mogul)
+ compact size - this is now my everyday MP3 player. With the TouchFlow interface, Bluetooth, and the smaller size, I see no need for an iPod now.
+ the apps utilizing the onboard accelerometer are really cool
+ YouTube app much better than Vtap on the Mogul

Dislikes:
- Using the FullyQuerty keyboard I am not 100% accurate - I was much quicker and more accurate with the Mogul's real keyboard
- Battery like is slightly worse than the Mogul, but I figure with the increased processing power this would be expected.

I'm glad I switched from the Mogul to the Diamond. I'll take the smaller size of the Diamond instead of the keyboard of the Touch Pro.

[bharris25]

I love my diamond. I went from the Treo 700p to the diamond and initially the battery life was horrible. But after about 2 weeks of use I decided to put a custom rom on it and problem solved. The stock diamond isn't really all that impressive but when you upgrade to a custom rom its like night and day. I don't know why sprint would leave such basic functionality out like the fm radio and the extra camera modes, just to say it does more would seem like it would make it easier to sell. A friend of mine has an iphone and while some of the apps are really cool like the music games and such it's just so locked down with what you can do with it compared to the diamond or any ppc. Another friend has the G1 and while it's really cool it just isn't there yet in terms of customization and no syncing with the desktop or use as a modem. My diamond as a modem is actually faster than his dsl. The barcode reader app for the G1 is a stroke of genius though and I haven't found one for the diamond that works as seemless yet. I had a 4gb sd card in my treo and when I was thinking about going with the Diamond or Pro I realized that I never really had my sd card filled up so that's not a problem for me. One weird thing on my diamond though is it takes about 13 mins for me to put a 700mb movie on it using it as a disk drive with windows, I have my computer dual booted with Ubuntu and I can put that same movie on in about 3 mins, don't know what that's all about. Setting it up to use as a modem with Ubuntu was also really easy, never got it to work with my treo because you had to know some kung fu code to get that to work. This is my first exp. using windows mobile, I really like the functionality of it. There were some stupid quirks with the palm os like I couldn't download a file that was more than 7 or 8 mb, I downloaded a file to my diamond that was 25mb no problem, don't know if that's a network thing or what though. The customization and removing bloatware though is where the diamond and I imagine all the windows mobile phones shine though. There's always some registry edit you can do, personally I like the 4 icons in a row in the programs and settings menu, little edit and problem solved, don't know why more cooks don't bake it in like that I haven't found myself accidently clicking on something while trying to scroll. I think if they ever get Android to easily install on the diamond we shall all be set. Best phone I've ever had. Makes me laugh thinking back to my old brick of a motorola flip phone back in 98.

[new2tech]

I love mine. This is by far the best phone I have owned

[JQuill]

Just be careful if you're installing a lot of 3d heavy ad ons / applications on the stock sprint rom. Touch Flo 3D got extremely distorted on me one day, disabling and enabling it didn't help. It literally looked like white noise but you could still read the text and see some icons, and use the slider. I had to restart and it hasn't yet happened again.

[k000]

Originally Posted by bharris25

I love my diamond. I went from the Treo 700p to the diamond and initially the battery life was horrible. But after about 2 weeks of use I decided to put a custom rom on it and problem solved. The stock diamond isn't really all that impressive but when you upgrade to a custom rom its like night and day. I don't know why sprint would leave such basic functionality out like the fm radio and the extra camera modes, just to say it does more would seem like it would make it easier to sell. A friend of mine has an iphone and while some of the apps are really cool like the music games and such it's just so locked down with what you can do with it compared to the diamond or any ppc. Another friend has the G1 and while it's really cool it just isn't there yet in terms of customization and no syncing with the desktop or use as a modem. My diamond as a modem is actually faster than his dsl. The barcode reader app for the G1 is a stroke of genius though and I haven't found one for the diamond that works as seemless yet. I had a 4gb sd card in my treo and when I was thinking about going with the Diamond or Pro I realized that I never really had my sd card filled up so that's not a problem for me. One weird thing on my diamond though is it takes about 13 mins for me to put a 700mb movie on it using it as a disk drive with windows, I have my computer dual booted with Ubuntu and I can put that same movie on in about 3 mins, don't know what that's all about. Setting it up to use as a modem with Ubuntu was also really easy, never got it to work with my treo because you had to know some kung fu code to get that to work. This is my first exp. using windows mobile, I really like the functionality of it. There were some stupid quirks with the palm os like I couldn't download a file that was more than 7 or 8 mb, I downloaded a file to my diamond that was 25mb no problem, don't know if that's a network thing or what though. The customization and removing bloatware though is where the diamond and I imagine all the windows mobile phones shine though. There's always some registry edit you can do, personally I like the 4 icons in a row in the programs and settings menu, little edit and problem solved, don't know why more cooks don't bake it in like that I haven't found myself accidently clicking on something while trying to scroll. I think if they ever get Android to easily install on the diamond we shall all be set. Best phone I've ever had. Makes me laugh thinking back to my old brick of a motorola flip phone back in 98.

Please consider formating your thoughts / inputs into paragraphs / bullets etc.

It would make it easier to read, and perhaps more folsk could read it. I gave up on second line..

[highwayman1224]

I didn't have a problem reading it. by the way, it's "folks", not "folsk".

[Fixup]

It is hard for me to resist a phone like this for only $285 shipped from ebay. Before I pull the trigger, I went to a local Sprint store to play with one. It is simply not responsive at all, pretty much not usable. Very difficult to type in "p";. The d-pad is a joke, so are the hard buttons. Photos taken on this phone are decent, good enough to leave my digital camera home, but the experience of taking photos is horrible - slow, sluggish, non-responsive like the overall interface. After only few minutes, it becomes quite warm.

Can a custom ROM really make this phone usable?

[madcook]

my diamond is so much faster than my vogue,more storage & the camera come on man we all know the diff there so need i say more.now the cons is the battery but if i turn off my data i can go more than 4 hours so over its the best