That might sound like a strange thing to say, but when my shiny new Touch Diamond, which I picked up from Orange this week, has no Orange branding or customisation of the UI. I hadn’t really noticed that until I went into the manual, where the screenshots are totally different from my phone. I was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong with the setup process, when I saw this thread at XDA-Developers.
Given that the phone shipped the day before the iPhone, I suspect the comments in that thread are close to the money - not enough time to test the customisations.
Personally, I’m much happier with a generic HTC phone. For one thing, I always turn off the Orange stuff anyway if I can, and for another, it should mean that I can apply HTC updates to my device without having to wait for Orange to release them (if ever!)
In related news, I was as surprised as Pocket PC Thoughts when I read the PCPro review of the Diamond. I’m not experiencing the speed issues of which they speak, and if you look around you will see a number of articles where they say that HTC acknowledged the speed problem in early devices and had made software updates to the retail devices to address them. My diamond spent yesterday connected to my PC and charging, but I will keep it away from the charger until it dies from this point forward to see how long I get. Remember that I hav exchange push chugging along all the time, so it’s never simply idle.
Even if you are worried about battery life (which I must admit, I was), then Expansys will shortly have the answer in the form of the extended battery!
In short then, still impressed with my new gadget!