HTC have been pretty busy over the last few months with the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, over the last week they filled in the low and medium-ends of the market by updating last year's Touch models with a TouchFLO 2D interface, now dubbed Touch Viva and Touch 3G.

More impressively they've released another high-end device to stand with the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. Called the Touch HD (no the screen isn't HD, and no they shouldn't call it HD).

It is larger than the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, the same size as an iPhone, although a little bit thinner than the iPhone 3G.

Touch HD features a larger screen than the iPhone, 3.8 inches compared with 3.5 inches. More importantly it carries over the same high resolution screens the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro have, only wider. It features a 800x480 resolution screen. That's 2.5 times as many pixels as the iPhone.

The rest of the specs look similar to the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, so in short it demolishes the iPhone. The same 528 MHz Qualcomm CPU in the Diamond and Pro. It has a microSD card slot, opposed to the Diamond which has 4GB of built in storage, its got the same 288MB of RAM like the Touch Pro, a higher resolution camera 5 megapixels, GPS, FM, and the rest of it. Although for the game fans out there, it does lose the 4 way direction pad of the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro.

When? Q4 2008 Europe, Q1 2009 rest of the world.

There's a few technology posts I haven't had the chance to do, but are on the todo list.

First up Photosynth.

If you haven't already played around with it do so. There's videos on the website to help explain how to take sets of images that synth well together, but I'll have my tips soon hopefully along with some of my own synths. I'm hoping to do St John's Church in town at some point, I think that would make a great synth.

Next up Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 thoughts.

Good release, I'll share my opinions on the new features soon I hope. Although I imagine this will be one of the topics I'll talk about on Gamercast this week too.

The last peice of tech I want to do is over the new bit of kit I've got on my desk.

Yes that is an HTC Touch Pro sat next to my monitor, and I'll be reviewing it within a couple of weeks.

I must say I am getting slightly irritated by O2, and their complete and utter lack of a product roadmap. As many of you know I've been after the HTC Touch Pro since before it was announced.

Catherine has had the HTC Touch Diamond for nearly two weeks (from Orange). Which when I was in Newport this week obviously checked out quite extensively. The short review: Much better than I had expected.

The Touch Pro, is essentially the Diamond, with a hardware keyboard, microSD slot and bigger battery, which should be released September time. My concern comes about from the complete and lack of information coming from O2 on the Diamond. They announced a new phone in their XDA lineup yesterday, called the Mantle (HTC P6500). But nothing on the Diamond, zippo, zilch.

What do I think is going on? They don't want to release the Touch Diamond because they've got contracts with Apple stating they have to shift X-number of iPhones, they don't want the Touch Diamond eating into potential iPhones being shifted, considering how low the iPhone's sales have been (despite the hype) they don't want to take any chances.

Newsflash O2: Apple will stab you in the back, like they've done to every partner in the entire history of the company.

Hopefully we won't get a repeat when the HTC Touch Pro is around the corner, it is less of a direct competitor. But if O2 don't make any announcements within a couple of weeks after another carrier releases it, it will be increasingly difficult for me to stay with O2. I'd be going crazy if I was a business customer trying to plan our upgrade cycle.

Maybe I'm too used the computer industry, where everybody (but Apple and a handful of other small companies who are too interested in screwing people over) has a roadmap. Windows "7"? Q1 2010. Office 2007 SP2? 1H 2009. It's nice knowing when something new is coming out years in advance, it lets you plan things. And before somebody says mobile phones develop faster (read: tested less). Sure, but roadmaps spanning 6 months ahead is easily feasible, it still takes over a year to develop a phone and carriers can make up their minds if they're going to be carrying something or not in that time.

Roadmap please O2.

Nice.

Well I'm impressed. So here's the official specifications of the Touch Pro where they differ to the Touch Diamond, looks like some of the leaked details from my previous post were a bit on the low side!

• Five-row qwerty keyboard.
• ROM: 512MB.
• RAM: 288MB.
• Battery: 1340mAh.
• TV-out!
• MicroSD slot (SD 2.0).
• Camera flash.

We can also see from the images that the corners are rounded, this isn't specific to the devices manufactured for T-Mobile, so that's good. I like rounded corners.

We can also see what TouchFLO 3D does when in landscape mode, it looks like it goes into big buttons mode.

The device is obviously quite a bit thicker than the Touch Diamond, although its still quite a bit smaller than my XDA Mini S, despite having the same size screen.

Nice one HTC, you've not only thrown the limited-expensive-underclocked-locked-down-over-hyped iPhone in the bin, you've also punched that dodgy salesman Steve Jobs in the face. He doesn't stand a chance at making inroads into Windows Mobile sales lead with this line up, not even with all the over-inflated attention Apple get in the press. Good luck with selling your 10 million iPhones this year Steve you're off to a slow start already, in Windows Mobile land we do about 10 million in four months - and that was before this phone was announced.

Anyway, now all I've got to do is wait until "late summer".

Here's one for Catherine, just to make her want this phone even more. CoolSmartphone have done up a really good video review of the HTC Touch Diamond (although bare in mind it isn't the final version, and lacks all the RAM of the final phone).

Day 1.
Day 2.
Day 3.
Day 4.
Day 5.
Day 6.
Day 7.
Weekend special.

Very good review, and a lot of questions answered. Including one I wanted to know, can the Touch FLO 3D interface be disabled, yes it can as its just a plug-in on the Today screen and can be disabled like any other. Sweet... Just in case I get fed up with that UI.

T-Mobile (Germany) was kind enough to announce their upcoming MDA Vario IV phone.

This is undoubtedly the HTC Raphael (aka the slide-out keyboard version of the HTC Touch Diamond).

There's a few key differences to the Touch Diamond.

• Slide out qwerty keyboard.
• 256MB of RAM, instead of 192MB.
• 512MB ROM, instead of 256MB.
• MicroSD slot, instead of 4GB internal storage.
• 1340mAh battery, as opposed to 900mAh.

That puts something like an additional 5mm on the depth of the device compared to the Touch Diamond.

No definite date as of yet, HTC haven't officially announced this device so it could be a little while. The rumour mill is suggesting late summer or early autumn, so about two or three months behind the Diamond - I think I can last that long.

O2 UK need to get off their backsides and make some announcements, and make sure HTC manufacturer their device to have nice rounded corners unlike the square corners of HTC's reference design, and get rid of some of the fingerprint-magnet-plastic on the device.