There was a great deal of buzz about the Touch Diamond before it launched. Tiny, sleek and with a whole new set of touch-based graphics to replace Windows Mobile, it seemed to be the Windows Mobile Professional device people had been waiting for to set the consumer market alight.

Sadly, the promise evaporated somewhat when the Touch Diamond appeared. There are some great things about this device. It is certainly small, for example. At 102mm tall, 51mm wide and 11.35mm thick it fits easily in the pocket.

And the new version of HTC's TouchFLO interface, renamed TouchFLO 3D, is really impressive. Like its predecessor you can sweep at the screen to move through some of the contents of the device. Photo contacts and photographs are flipped through as if they were on a virtual rolodex machine, for example.

The select button on the front fascia has a touch sensitive surround and running a finger around this lets you zoom into photos and perform other tasks. There are lots of tricks like this, and they are great fun to play with.

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But despite HTC's best efforts you do end up back in the Windows Mobile standard interface sooner or later, and this is a bit of a disappointment after using TouchFLO 3D.

The back of the casing has a patterned, raised, diamond-like effect we don't like too much. The front fascia is almost entirely flat with the Call, End, Home and Back buttons on a flat panel and the D-pad being that touch sensitive area we mentioned earlier. Its limits aren't marked and we found it easy to miss them until we got used to it. The plastic casing just doesn't feel right given the high price tag of this device.

With Wi-Fi, GPS, HSDPA to 7.2Mbps, 3-megapixel main camera, front-facing camera for video calling and a 640 x 480 pixel, 2.8-inch screen, the Touch Diamond packs in the features. There is 4GB of built-in storage too, but no expansion slot so the convenience of using one of these for file transfer is not present. This is a real shame.

The biggest shame of all, though, is the battery life. After our experience testing the Touch Diamond we'd say it delivers less than half the staying power we'd normally expect from a Windows Mobile device. Daily charging is a requirement and you may find you need even more frequent charging than that.

On paper the Touch Diamond is a desirable device. Some of this desirability remains in the real world, but the poor battery life is the biggest of several irritations.