Comparison pictures:

Original article (in Chinese) can be found here.

Here are the specifications for the new HTC Diamond - via the HTC Web Site:

Re-defining the perception of advanced mobile phones… the HTC Touch Diamond™ signals a giant leap forward in combining hi-tech prowess with intuitive usability and exhilarating design.

Featuring a sharp 2.8-inch touch screen housed within a stunning formation of brushed steel and flawless faceted edges, the HTC Touch Diamond is as beautiful to behold as it is to use.

With HTC’s vibrant touch-responsive user interface, TouchFLO™ 3D, and ultra-fast HSDPA internet connectivity… the HTC Touch Diamond offers a rich online experience to rival a notebook computer, allowing you to interact with Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia as freely as you would with a broadband connection.

Your contacts, favourite music, videos and photos are no longer an uninspired line of text. With TouchFLO 3D, album artwork, video stills and snapshots of your friends’ and family’s faces are brought to life for you to interact, play and launch at your fingertips.

A 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera will help you capture the perfect moment in style and with a massive 4GB of internal storage you can keep all the files you need. The integrated ultra-sensitive GPS will help you find your destination as quickly and efficiently as a dedicated satellite navigation unit.

Style and substance in a phone are no longer mutually exclusive. The HTC Touch Diamond has arrived.

Highlights

- 2.8-inch touch screen, with four times the pixels of most phones.

- Vibrant TouchFLO 3D user interface, responding perfectly to your finger gestures when scrolling through contacts, browsing the web, and launching media… all vividly displayed as photos and artwork powered by the 3D graphics processor.

- HTC Weather - providing a constant view of weather at home and abroad.

- Surf and download at broadband speed with HSDPA internet connectivity.

- 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera for quality stills and video.

- 4GB of internal storage to preserve more photos, music, files and exchanged data than ever before.

- Integrated GPS for use with maps software for a full turn-by-turn satellite navigation experience.

Forget touchscreen, or uber “green” solar powered coffee tables… Kyle Downes has modded the coffee table into its best version ever: a retro-tastic NES controller. The high quality finish and classy glass top isn’t the end of this awesome mod… it actually works. Don’t believe it? Check out the video after the gallery.

Kyle spent months putting this together, starting with a scanned image of his original NES control. This he then simply scaled up, carefully crafting each piece out of MDF and hacking his own wiring onto a broken old controller board. The glass top was the final touch, to protect those giant buttons, and inside there’s plenty of storage. I guess if you’re up for some giant 8-bit game-controlling action you’d probably need someone else on hand.

Kutner and Olson studied 1200 middle-school children in a $1.5 million federally funded study. Instead of studying the children in the laboratory, like other studies, the pair actually sat down and talked to kids after long bouts of game playing – sometimes in excess of 15 hours a week. The lucky kids played a variety of games from the very non-violent The Sims to grandma shooting, pedestrian bashing Grand Theft Auto.

They discovered that children who played violent video games – those rated Mature or above – were just relieving stress. Some children did exhibit some playful fighting after playing games, but this was similar to what children have always done after watching action or Karate-type movies.

51% of male children who played 15 hours or more of violent games per week were involved in fights in the past year compared to 28% who played regular video games. For girls, 40% of the violent game players were in fights compared to 14% of the non-violent players. Despite the figures, Kutner and Olson say this is just a correlation and that the fighting was probably due to an underlying psychological problem that children had before playing the video game.

Perhaps the most startling finding (at least for people the likes of Jack Thompson) is that boys that don’t play any video games at all are now considered to be socially inept. A danger sign for boys is “not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence,” says Kutner and Olsen.

I wonder if Kutner and Olsen will now do a follow-up study to find out if the children who play GTA4 will have increased carjacking skills?

You can get the book online from Amazon for about $16.

Top demotivational posters:

The Diamond is equipped with a beefy 528 MHz processor, 4GB storage inbuilt, HSDPA, FM Radio, 3.2MP camera. Unlike the other “Touch” GPS built in and working out of the box. Check out the overview of the device:

The Diamond runs on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.1, Microsoft latest version of Windows Mobile. Unfortunately Microsoft hasn’t made many great improvements to the user interface of Windows Mobile, so what HTC has done is build in applications and customizations to work around the wonkiness of WM.These customizations are called TouchFlo 3D which adds the following sweetness to the device:

• Rather than having to initiate it with a swipe, it replaces Windows Mobile’s standard Today screen
• TouchFLO 3D also appears to be very well integrated in the OS. It’s less of an add-on and more of a new philosophy towards Windows Mobile. For example, the 5-way is also touch-sensitive so you can rotate your thumb around it to zoom in and out. It also demonstrates the power of Windows Mobile’s data structure — TouchFLO 3D has previews of emails, allows you to examine your pictures, and plays your music directly within the interface.
• TouchFLO 3D tech is also built-into a custom build of Opera 9.5. But get this, no matter what your zoom level is, the text automatically wraps to the zoom. This is in contrast to the iPhone’s browser, which sometimes is unable to get the text to wrap properly.
• TouchFLO 3D is, in fact, 3D in its animation effects. The Touch Diamond, unlike previous HTC devices, appears to be fully hardware accelerated and uses that power to full effect.

Weather

Photos and Videos

People

Music

Essentially, TippingPoint can now overtake the infected system and cause it to connect to TippingPoint’s fake Kraken server and receive a command to kill the target process handing the communication. In other words, they CAN stop the spam spewing from these machines. The catch is, they would be sending remote commands to someone’s computer without their knowledge which has caused an ethical dilemma. If they send the commands and stop the spam they are basically hacking the infected computer to do something the end user doesn’t know about.

Personally, I say they send the commands… the computers are already infected. I can however see the issue they have, nobody wants their machine doing anything without their permission. They don’t want to be as bad as the bad guys.

Read more on the issue at eWeek.

Version 2.1 contains mostly bug fixes in this new release, although there is a new data connection indicator on the Professional Now Screen, along with support for voicemail, hardware keyboards, and 320 x 320 screens. If you’ve got v2.0, this is a free update.

What’s New:

• Data connection indicator on the Professinal Now Screen

• Voicemail support

• 320×320 screens support

• Hardware keyboard support

• Stability bug fixes

Product page: http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/mobileshell/

While Sprint users are waiting (and waiting) for the Windows Mobile 6.1 update that we assume will have REvA and GPS (only WM6.1 was officially announced) apparently some craft folks over at PPCGeeks have managed to take the Alltel ROM, rip it apart and get it to install on the Sprint Touch. So… if you’re comfortable with it you can now get not only RevA but GPS on your Sprint Touch as well!

• Sprint Rev A + GPS
• Verizon Rev A + GPS - some have reported this isn’t totally stable yet

It’s pretty interesting to see information on the number of books sold, cars sold, computers sold, water used versus people without viable drinking water, etc.Here’s a screenshot of a small portion of the stats they show (note that when you view it on the website below the statistics are being update in real-time.:

http://www.worldometers.info/