htc

The HTC Touch Diamond is coming to Sprint. We know this. We've just been waiting to find out when.

But those of you/us who have been patiently waiting to get your hands on an honest-to-goodness U.S. version may not have to wait much longer.

A Bloomberg article (via Engadget Mobile) notes in its final sentence that HTC "will begin selling the handset through Sprint Nextel Corp. in August."

Why, that's this month! Engadget Mobile also has reports that both Best Buy and Radio Shack are getting the Diamond in this month -- Best Buy on the 17th and Radio Shack on Sept. 2nd.

Other questions remain. Will it have the multi-faced "Diamond" back? We'll see. Pricing? Remember that Canada's Telus is offering the Touch Diamond for $149. That's in Canadian dollars - and with a three-year contract, which is the norm up there. It's going for $349 with a two-year deal. Do your own extrapolating from there.

Phone Scoop [via Mobility Site] caught the Touch Diamond over at the FCC yesterday. Ordinarily, this wouldn't bother us much, as we have long figured that it would show up in CDMA flavor here first. Oh ho, but wait, this Diamond is GSM: “This new version seen on the FCC site includes WCDMA 850/1900, and also confirms Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and Wi-Fi.”

Those WCDMA 850/1900 bands are the bands that AT&T uses for 3G here in the states. That means, of course, that the Diamond isn't going to be stuck as an EDGE-only device here. What we don't know is whether or not AT&T is going to officially pick it up. They gave the original Touch a pass and we haven't heard any rumblings yet about them picking it up, so the outlook isn't great on getting this thing at a subsidized price.

As usual, HTC has asked the the rest of the details they sent to the FCC be kept confidential, this time “indefinitely.” Ouch.

It turns out that the HTC Diamond's lack of support for the US bands we need to use the thing reliably may not be a hardware limitation. wmpoweruser [via] has unearthed this thread from XDA that includes a new Radio ROM. See -- there's the ROM for your smarpthone and a separate ROM for the radio. This new ROM enables support for the 850 band for EDGE, meaning the Diamond has suddenly become a viable (though EDGE-only) phone for most of the US!

Those readers have some cause to rejoice - an updated Radio ROM (V100.25.05) leaked by XDA-Developers hackers manages to activate the hidden 850 Mhz radio, allowing GSM and EDGE connectivity to work on all the GSM networks in USA. Unfortunately there is still no support for US 3G, but one is left only to wonder whether this is very far behind, seeing how HTC is planning to release the HTC Touch Diamond on the Australian Telstra network, which uses the same 3G bands as AT&T. - wmpoweruser

Indeed, if the enterprising hackers at XDA can unlock EDGE's 850 band, mayhap they can get this battlestation fully operational here in the US sooner than the rebel alliance, er, HTC does!

While you were busy spending your Independence Day stuffing yourself with hot dogs and hamburgers, another iteration of HTC's Touch Dual was working its way through the FCC.

As Endgadget Mobile points out, the "Neon" designation points to the Touch family, and the FCC testing shows a CDMA radio.

So, customers of Alltel/Verizon and/or Sprint or may have another Windows Mobile device (and big brother to the keypadless HTC Touch, which all two three carriers are currently selling) to look forward to in the coming months.

And for a look at what may be in store (minus carrier customizations, of course), check out Dieter's recent review of the unlocked GSM Touch Dual.

NEON400 FCC filing

The Touch Pro and the Diamond are definitely the new hotness -- though we still don't know yet when we're going to see an American release. The Diamond made the rounds on the interw00ts first, now comes the Touch Pro. Mobileburn takes a peek and notes that HTC wouldn't let them play around with the inteface, perhaps hinting at yet more TouchFLO 3D enhancements coming down the pike. SlashGear is justifiably happy that the back of the device is matted so there'll be fewer fingerpints. Finally, PhoneScoop find the Touch Pro to be a little thick to their liking. We suppose compared to the Diamond, darn near anything is going to fee a little thick.

As excited as we are for the Xperia X1, we're HTC boys at heart. The Touch Pro looks to beat it by just a hair.

[via]

For awhile now we've been covering the whole "HTC/Qualcomm Video driver drama" (read our insider Q&A for some perspective and more here).

So far we know that the unbranded HTC TyTN II (aka "Tilt") is getting WM 6.1 with a video performance boost, but no gurantees that the AT&T branded version will be getting the same. We also know that the HTC Touch Diamond, which is a powerful VGA device, does have the DirectDraw video drivers on board, though up until recently they too have underperformed.

The big question was whether the lot of other HTC devices that are based on the MSM-7xxx series chipset would be getting any help from HTC? So far, the answer appears to be "no".

Enter some crafty hackers and dedicated software pros to start piecing together bits and pieces from the TyTN II, Touch Diamond and the K620 and have a somewhat working version of the OpenGL ES driver, which according to the HTCClassAction.org site:

...provides the DirectDraw (2D) capability; so getting the OpenGL ES driver to work correctly is a big step in getting the D3D and DD working.

As you can see from their demo video, the tester app flickers during the test, but that is a result of a problem with the tester program, not the OpenGL drivers. But this proof-of-concept demonstration definitely hints that exporting and enabling these advanced video driver capabilities is possible.

Click the link to watch the the OpenGL ES Driver in action!

We'll continue to follow this story as usual!

Via Tilt Site