Lately my trusty old Samsung A 900 hasn’t been holding its battery charge very well. In the market for a new cell phone and hyped up by the recent hubbub about touch screen interface phones I began researching and shopping for options.
My provider is Sprint (better coverage in my area) so I narrowed my choices down to the Samsung Instinct, HTC Touch Diamond, or go completely alternative and jump on the RIM Blackberry wagon with either the Pearl or the Curve.
My goal was to get a phone with good call clarity, email and web capabilities, responsive and comfortable interface (touch or buttons), and enough memory to function as a player for my favorite Audible audio books.
I went down to my local Sprint store to get a hands-on feel for each of these phones and here is what I found:
The Disappointment – HTC Touch is slow, awkward to use
I was really looking forward to the HTC Touch Diamond. Nerd sites like Engadget have been talking up this thing well before it ever came out.
HTC’s demo animations and videos did indeed look promising: sexy high resolution screen, great touch responsiveness, and a slew of neat features that would guarantee me a wonderful time wasting a lot of time.
At the Sprint store I was handed a brand new HTC Touch Diamond to play around with, since it hadn’t been properly charged I plugged it in via its power adapter.
First off, the Touch Diamond is quite small, a bit larger than a Sandisk Sansa e260 or two thirds the width and half the depth of a pack of cigarettes.
Impressive, albeit a little awkward to hold because of its super smooth surface. I didn’t like the red backplate on the Touch Diamond at all but would live with it if its functionality was great.
Oh horrors!
Within two minutes I already made the decision that the HTC Touch Diamond was not for me: the start up time of the phone was rediculous, it took close to one minute to be fully up and ready to make calls.
Once the device was turned on, navigating around was like pulling teeth, with the touch screen being so unresponsive at times that it took me several attempts before anything would happen.
Since the screen is so small, all touch screen “buttons” and graphics are so close together that it’s incredibly tough to hit the right one. On more than one occasion did I accidentally hit two adjacent graphics, which meant I had to go back and try again in order to get to my desired destination.
The worst part about this was how slow and stuttery the whole thing was: it appeared that the HTC Touch Diamond’s processor was simply not powerful enough to properly display all those fancy animations and graphics.
I don’t know if the TouchFlo 3D user interface was to blame (this can be turned off) but either way everything was way too slow.
Even dialing a phone number was a pain because the touch screen simply wouldn’t respond to several of my finger taps. I’m a big guy with guitar playing fingers so I doubt it had anything to do with having too light a touch…
The HTC Touch Diamond was a major disappointment to put it mildly. I will not wait for the Touch Pro either as it’ll be almost the same, except at least it’ll have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and an expansion slot for additional memory. The Touch Diamond’s memory is limited to its 4 Gb of integrated memory.
Add to that the hefty price tag ($249.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate from Sprint which can take up to two months to arrive) I decided this iPhone-killer-turned-crap-in-reality was not for me.
On to the next device…
Samsung Instinct – Better responsiveness, still not impressed
I moved over to see if the Samsung Instinct would fare any better. In the responsiveness department it did. The Instinct performed far better and faster in terms of moving between screens, pulling up web pages, and using its touch dial pad.
It’s a little longer than the HTC Touch Diamond and about the same width. It’s quite light too. While the surface of the Instinct was quite smooth, it was easier to hold than the Touch Diamond, possibly because it’s slightly longer, and its corners aren’t rounded as much.
Here is the weird part: I’m not sure why but for some reason the Samsung Instinct didn’t wow me like I thought it might. There was nothing wrong with it and its touch screen worked much better for me than the HTC. Maybe it was the lack of “jazz” on its interface, or the fact that I couldn’t play my Audible files on it (the Instinct’s Java-based Operating System is not supported by Audible’s .aa files, I checked).
Either way, I was ready to move over to the opposite side of the display rack and take a look at the Blackberry devices.
Blackberry Curve by Research in Motion (RIM)
The first thing I noticed was how tiny the Curve is.
And ugly.
It’s too wide (fat) and just has a funky look to it. But functionality wins out for looks when it comes to communication devices, so I gave it a shot.
Neither the Blackberry Curve nor the Pearl (or any other Blackberry device except the upcoming Storm on the Verizon Wireless network) are touchscreen phones.
You navigate around mainly using the tiny “joystick” dial pad in the middle (yellow ring on the graphic to the left).
The dial pad is very responsive, so much so that it’s easy to go further than you want at first. Still, after a few tries I got the hang of it and found the navigation to be quite easy and efficient.
The deal breaker? The actual dial pad.
It was impossible for me to dial a phone number without hitting some of the adjacent keys. I don’t have huge fat fingers, yet it took a lot of slow, concentrated, and precise dialing with my fingertips to dial a phone number. It felt awkward to tell you the truth.
Ideally I’d like to be able to dial without looking, by kinestetic (feel) only. This is not really possible with a touch screen, I know, but I do expect this to be possible at least to some degree on a device with physical buttons.
Overall it was uncomfortable to hold and use the Curve. But the price is right at about a hundred bucks after mail-in rebate (I hate those!) from Sprint.
Blackberry Pearl for Sprint
Next to the Curve the Sprint store has a working model of the Blackberry Pearl. Now there’s a neat little bugger!
No bigger than the HTC Touch Diamond, the Pearl just has something attractive about it. Yes, there is no touch screen but my bad experiences with those a few minutes ago (and a few years ago with one of the first touch screen phones for which I can’t remember the name and which I returned after a week of hating it) I was resigning myself to physical buttons again.
And this time, contrary to the Blackberry Curve, the Pearl’s dial buttons were actually much easier to use. I was able to dial a number without looking (much) and never hit any of the adjacent buttons by accident. Excellent!
Navigating through the different menus with the Pearl’s navigation pad in the middle was about as responsive and easy as with the Curve.
Once again I was able to get into the email and web browsing menus with ease.
Comparing the HTC Touch, the Samsung Instinct, the Blackberry Curve, and the Blackberry Pearl practically side by side I felt the Pearl felt and worked the best.
Easy to hold, easy to navigate, and by far the best phone number dialing option made the Pearl my choice.
Blackberry’s reputation for email and business use, as well as the neat price tag of a penny shy of $80 (after that damn mail in rebate of course) enhanced my enthusiasm for the Blackberry Pearl.
But by the end I did not go with the Pearl either because now I’m tempted to wait for Verizon Wireless to release the Blackberry Storm. Yes, playing around with those Blackberry devices really did something to me.
And both the Pearl and the Curve support my beloved Audible files. 
Apple iPhone – Not gonna happen
The iPhone is not an option for me: I refuse to go with AT&T because everyone with an iPhone in my area seems to have nothing but problems with reception. The iPhone has some great features but its lack of Flash and WMV support, inability to do copy and pasting, and reception problems are deal breakers for me.
No, at this point it appears my needs are probably best met by Blackberry devices. Let’s see how the Blackberry Storm measures up once it’s released.
SUMMARY
HTC Touch Diamond
Slow startup, sluggish screen, bad responsiveness to touch, non-intuitive interface, overpriced;
Samsung Instinct
Okay responsiveness, comfortable feel, boring interface, custom Java OS incompatible with many desired applications and files such as Audible’s .aa audio books;
Blackberry Curve
Bulky looking, dial buttons too tiny and too close together, small but fairly sharp and bright screen, decent and fast navigation;
Blackberry Pearl
Small and comfortable to hold and use, excellent dial buttons, small but fairly sharp and bright screen, decent navigation, good price, only available in red or gray from Sprint.
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