It was only two days ago that the details about HTC's Diamond leaked, and the handset was officially announced by HTC yesterday. It looks like it's going to be a serious contender in the smartphone market and it might steal a few iPhone customers from Apple before they get their 3G handset onto the market.

There wasn't much that we didn't know about the handset, but we have to be honest and say that it looks better than we expected from the early renders, although it's a tad on the square side. What we didn't know was that HTC had updated its TouchFLO user interface to TouchFLO 3D, which takes advantage of the 3D graphics processing of the CPU in the device.

This allows for a much better integrated version of TouchFLO and HTC seems to have gone to lengths to try to make more use if its proprietary front end for Windows Mobile. HTC has also created a larger, easier to use virtual keyboard and added some other custom applications.

Hardware-wise, nothing has really changed from the leaked specifications; the only addtions are the amount of memory the device has, and it comes with 192MB of RAM and 256MB or ROM in additon to the 4GB of flash memory we already told you about. This is quite generous compared to previous devices from HTC and most other Windows Mobile devices.

The expected launch date is the 19^th of June and at least in the U.K. it will be available for free with various networks depending on your tariff, but you can also pre-order it right now from someone like Expansys for £434.94, but it doesn't seem to be available on any of Expansys' other online stores around the world as yet.

You can find out more details about the HTC Diamond here 

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