Archos 50 Diamond review: Emerald cut

Phonebook and telephony

The phonebook is clean and simple. Its main screen is where everything is laid out - there's a search bar on the top, the last dialed number beneath it and the most-dialed contacts just below. You can get to all contacts or you can open up the call log, dialer and settings through the three icons at the bottom of the page.

The search bar can handle contact search but there is also smart dialing from which you can find people in your list of contacts. The quick contacts feature triggers on tapping a contact image to bring up a tabbed popup window.

Phonebook and dialer

While editing a contact, you can add various new fields to fill in more info for the contact. You can link contacts too, if you've added the same person on multiple services.

Groups are listed by service (e.g. your Gmail account), while favorites are a listed as a grid of large contact photos, which is readily thumbable.

Call quality

Calling quality with the Archos 50 Diamond was nice and clean and we enjoyed plenty of volume and a crisp sound. The signal held on well in our testing and we didn't experience call drops.

Since the Archos 50 Diamond is dual SIM you can choose which SIM card will use data connection, meaning only one will be able to enjoy 3G and 4G connectivity.

Conventional call blocking via black listing isn't available but you can always choose to send a certain number to voice mail. There's no Do Not Disturb mode to filter notifications during the wee hours, though - a feature we consider a must-have in a modern smartphone.

Speakerphone

The Archos 50 Diamond posted below average loudness levels in all three of our loudspeaker tests - pink noise, ringing and voice.

Messaging, email and text input

You can choose Google Hangouts or the default messaging app to handle your text messages. Hangouts has two pages - the first one shows all of your conversations, while the second lists the people you exchanged Hangouts with, plus suggested contacts and other contacts (a.k.a. from your phonebook).

The messaging section is business as usual. All SMS/MMS communication is organized into threads - each thread consists of all messages between you and one of your contacts.

Each thread is organized like an IM chat session, the latest message at the bottom. You can manage individual messages (forward, copy, delete) and even lock them (to prevent deletion). You can use search to find a specific message in all conversations.

Messages and Hangouts

The Gmail app and the generic email app are now almost identical in both looks and functionality. They feature color-coded sender images, based on the first letter of the sender's name. Both apps support multiple accounts too.

Gmail

Text input

The Google keyboard is the default text input option out of the box. It is one of the most preferred Android keyboards out there and its keys are comfortably large in both portrait and landscape mode.

Gesture typing is available as usual. Naturally, it benefits from the already existing Android word prediction, so you can just click on the words the keyboard suggests.

A tap on the text area will reveal a "handle" attached to the text cursor - it's easy and more accurate, which makes correcting mistakes easier. A double tap will bring up the select options - Select word and Select All - with two handles to adjust the start and end of the selection.

If a word has a typo, it will be underlined in red and when you tap it, the phone will offer a number of suggested corrections along with options to add the word to the phone's dictionary or just delete it.

Voice input is available as well and it works great too. It doesn't even require network connection if you download the specific language file and make it available for offline usage.

Google Keyboard