Archos 50 Diamond review: Emerald cut

Retail package

The Archos 50 Diamond comes packed with a microUSB cable, headphones with volume control and microphone and an A/C adapter rated at 1A.

Archos 50 Diamond unboxing

Design

Archos has gone with a simple yet elegant design for the 50 Diamond. The front offers a clean and flat design accented by a small chin at the bottom that carries over the color of the wrap-around back panel. There are no on-screen buttons - those are replaced by capacitive touch buttons for home, back and menu under the screen. The buttons light up ever so slightly and mostly stay out of the way. The screen blends in with the rest of the black front resulting in a very clean, incognito look.

The Archos 50 Diamond is a little taller than its 5" screen diagonal might suggest. It measures 146 x 70.4 but it's reasonably thin at 8 mm. The weight is acceptable at 142g rounding off a balanced frame that's not too heavy nor too big.

Archos 50 Diamond up front

The back is much less flat. There are curves for the sides and also the camera hump. You can get the Archos 50 Diamond in black but our unit sports a fresh yellow paintjob that turns outright electric under certain lighting conditions.

The back panel remains clean in its design. Aside from the camera hump and LED flash there's only a subtle back-facing speaker grille that sits in the bottom corner and completes the design package.

Sides and back

The sides of the Archos 50 Diamond are flat but have a slight bevel were they meet the back. There's also a very subtle curve to the top and bottom of the phone making it appear a little tilted under certain angles.

Controls and handling

The front of the Archos 50 Diamond hosts a 5" IPS LCD of 1920 x 1080px resolution, 8MP front-facing camera, earpiece and three capacitive touch buttons under the display for home, back and menu. Holding down the home button prompts up Google Now while a double tap will open up the task switcher interface.

There is no option in the software to add on-screen buttons to the Archos 50 Diamond.

The front

There's a power button and volume rocker on the left side of the 50 Diamond and only the slit to take off the back panel on the right side.

The sides

The bottom is where the microUSB port and main microphone are and opposite we find the 3.5mm audio jack and the main microphone.

Top and bottom

The 16MP camera lens protrudes a bit on the back's upper side. Next to it there's a single LED flash. The single speaker is on the bottom left under a grille. There are two miniscule nobs on either side of the speaker that ensure it won't get muffled when the phone is lying on its back.

The back

Undoing the back panel reveals the non-replaceable 2,700 mAh battery, the two microSIM slots and the microSD card slot. You can see the NFC antenna glued to the back cover.

Under the hood

The rounded sides and back panel feel very comfortable in the hand and the whole phone slides through the palm and fingers. However fans of square, sharp phones will have to make adjustments here.

Handling