Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"We've just laid eyes on a handful of documents detailing HTC's efforts to ready the Diamond and Raphael models -- already known to be valid HTC codenames -- for Sprint later this year, and things are definitely looking up in the post-Touch world. The Diamond turns out to be the successor to that very device, lacking a physical keyboard and relying almost exclusively on a large, glossy touchscreen for user input; the Raphael meanwhile (pictured) features a full QWERTY deal and is destined to replace the Mogul."



Remember that fuzzy picture of HTC's phone lineup? Well, looks like the mystery device(s) are CDMA models destined for Sprint, with the slider out in September and the touch version in November. Both will feature WiFi, 3MP cameras and VGA displays (woot!) - I also rather suspect they'll also have HTC's new Manila interface. Now, when are we getting GSM versions for these babies?

"For those that don’t know, HTC’s "Manilla" [sic] is basically a customized interface that’s on top of the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS. The actual screen shots a good friend provided us with are from a "cooked" X7510 ROM with the "Manilla" part thrown in from an unreleased VGA device HTC is working on. Also we’ve been told that "Manilla" is not technically TouchFLO 2.0, TouchFLO 2.0 just has a few updates to the scrolling part of it and the cube, nothing more than that."



Another interface? So what's new? Well for starters, unlike TouchFlo, the interface covers more applications and not just the Today screen - from the screenshots, it appears all the HTC-developed applications feature the new interface. Dare we hope that this will be the standard interface for the x7510? And that it gets propagated to all other new HTC devices? And somebody hacks it so those of us with "legacy" devices get to enjoy it too?