14 DAY TRIAL // After the Canadian announcement of Samsung Instinct, which will be available starting August from both Bell and Telus, another touchscreen handset is presented now as "coming soon" in Canada: HTC Touch Diamond. Unlike the Instinct, though, the Diamond will apparently be released exclusively via Telus.
The third largest Canadian operator already features the new HTC Pocket PC on its website and it has also announced its prices, which we listed below:
- $149.99 with a contract agreement for three years and a voice/data plan of at least $45 per month;
- $349.99 with a 2-year contract;
- $399.99 with a contract for one year;
- $449.99 with no contract at all.
The free-of-contract price is quite low if compared to the one that the Diamond is sold for in Europe (about $750), so there might be a catch to it. But since Telus doesn't mention more about this, we don't know anything for sure.
What's interesting about the Touch Diamond that will be released by Telus is that its design is a bit changed and its margins are rounder than the ones of the original edition of the handset, announced by HTC at the beginning of May and already on sale in Europe. Also, the diamond pattern of the original edition's back case seems to be missing. This might mean that all the CDMA versions of the Diamond will look like this, the square margins and the diamond pattern being "reserved" for the GSM one.
As for the features of Touch Diamond, these include a 2.8 inch TFT touchscreen display with 480 x 640 pixels (thus VGA resolution), a new TouchFlo 3D interface, one-touch access to Facebook and YouTube, GPS with Telus Navigation, Wi-Fi, Opera Mobile browser, Telus mobile email, a 3.2 Megapixel camera, advanced multimedia capabilities, Bluetooth 2.0, miniUSB, 4GB of internal memory and, of course, Windows Mobile 6.1 OS.
For the time being, Canada has only few touchscreen handsets, but it seems that the country is finally going touchscreen. HTC Touch Diamond, Samsung Instinct and the iPhone 3G (which will be released on July 11, via Rogers and Fido) are among the best full-touch handsets to come out this year, so I guess Canadian users should be happy they'll have the chance to get their hands on any of them.
The exact release date of HTC Touch Diamond has not been announced by Telus, but the handset will probably be available in August the latest.
