Windows Mobile

We had a few minutes to sit down and play around with the new HTC Diamond and found it to be a pretty decent phone. (Our apologies if we’re picking up the English penchant for understatement.)

Picking it up, it’s quite light and slim, a bit smaller and lighter than the iPhone. While the entire front isn’t a touchscreen, it has a glossy finish that picks up fingerprints quite well. Below the touchscreen are four push buttons that surround a nav-pad that, too, is touch-activated. The screen itself was fairly easy to use, although we noticed a little bit of lag when scrolling through the various menu items at the bottom of the page. HTC reps didn’t have these problems, so we’ll chalk it up to inexperience.

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Windows Mobile 6.1 is officially official and we’ve had our hands on a unit running Microsoft’s freshest mobile OS for quite some time now. We’re pleased with the improvements in the new, easier-to-navigate user interface, and we especially like the streamlined text messaging.

Check out our full review of the OS, which we gave four stars. We docked a star because, while the whole Windows Mobile experience is more consumer friendly, Internet Explorer still didn’t live up to our expectations. For one, it still drags and doesn’t have multimedia functionality, but Microsoft did attempt to improve the experience by adding a panning feature, which lets you zoom around a Web page and select a specific portion to view.

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Adobe announced this morning that Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite 3.x for future versions of its Internet Explorer mobile browser as well as Reader LE for viewing Adobe PDF documents on your mobile handset without needing third-party software to do so.

In the past, Flash Lite 3 support has been limited to handsets running Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 and Qualcomm BREW. Users with Windows Mobile 5 may have had experience playing Flash Lite 2.1 on their phones, but it wasn’t an optimal experience because it didn’t support FLV files on Web sites. Flash Lite 3 was launched in October 2007, adding FLV support, as well as a 15-20 percent increase in ActionScript performance, and a 20-30 percent increase in rendering performance. It now supports most Flash 8 content available on the Web. For more changes between the versions, check out Adobe’s version comparison Web site.

The announcement means that consumers will have a richer out-of-the-box browsing experience, although Adobe wasn’t clear in naming which version of Windows Mobile Microsoft would include Adobe Flash Lite. If you’re antsy to view Flash Web sites on your mobile phone sooner, we suggest signing up for the second Skyfire beta, a browser that already supports Flash and provides much faster browsing speeds than IE mobile does.