HTC's latest 3G touchscreen beauty

HTC has just taken the wraps off its latest device, the HTC Touch Diamond. The comparisons with the iPhone, justified or not, are already being drawn: it’s a high end device with a lot of storage (4GB) and a touch interface. It also appears to be aimed squarely at the consumer market, rather than HTC’s traditional business heartland – it’s got a “customised new, HTC-developed, YouTube application”, 7.2Mbps HSDPA and a 3.2 megapixel camera for starters.

The device runs on Windows Mobile 6.1, as you’d expect, but there’s one notable difference on this HTC phone: the Diamond’s browser is based on Opera, not Internet Explorer – a bit of a coup for the Opera folks. It looks like HTC has done some cool stuff with the touchscreen, with an iPhone alike ability to rotate the view to either landscape or portrait depending on how you hold the device, pan and zoom with one hand and autofocus the camera just by pressing the screen. Can’t wait to see all this in action.