The HTC Legend – Finally An Android Phone That Competes With The iPhone?

Could this be the best Android phone to date?

The phone is a relative of the HTC Hero, a handset which has been extremely popular.

Many people are talking about this as being the Android phone that can really take some significant market share from the iPhone.

Design and Display

The deisgn in my opinion looks Apple like.  That’s not a bad thing and it will make the phone more popular.

Too many Android phones seem to be trying to do something different from what Apple have been so successful with in their designs.

It looks like HTC have gone with what is popluar with the Legend.

The display is amazingly colorful and vibrant.  It’s not an LCD screen, but a 3.2 inch OLED, which is 320×480 pixels.  This gives great quality.  It’s something that stands out when you look at the phone.

There’s an optical track pad on the phone which seems to be an improvement on the trackball, especially in the design sense.  It’s modern looking and adds yet another dimension to the futuristic nature of this phone.

Everything about the design seems to have been done with attention to detail.  You won’t find ports just put in a certain place because it’s easy, it seems like the designers have given consideration about where to place necessary parts of the phone to integrate with the great design.

The headphone slot is nicely placed at the top of the phone and integrates really well.  There’s also an LED light on the back of the phone which tells you when you’ve got new messages and other alerts.

It’s future proof too.  It has a miniUSB slot which will allow universal chargers to work with it.  These are becoming more common and will eventually be everywhere.

Performance

The legend has Android 2.1 as well as HTC’s Sense UI.  If you don’t know what HTC Sense is, it adds what you could call customized widgets to the phone which allow you to use the phone in the way that you want.  You can essentially customize the phone to how you most frequently use it.

HTC Sense allows you to integrate social media that you use most into one screen along with email, contacts and the other things that you find most useful.  On the Legend you get 7 homescreens to customize.

You can use HTC Leap with these 7 screens which lets you pinch the screen and see all the screens at once.  A nice feature.

The phone has a 600MHz processor, which isn’t as large as some of the other Android phones out there, but the Legend shows it doesn’t need to be larger.  It’s very fast and efficient.

Since the bar was raised with the iPhone in terms of sensitivity to touch and quality of use there hasn’t really been any phone that can stand up against it.  The HTC Legend does.

The sensitivity when using it’s screens are superb.  There are no glitches or issues that you can find on other Android phones.  All this built on top of the Android platform really does make for something pretty special.

It’s absolutely fantastic for people who want to be able to change layouts, customize things and make the phone their own.  Other Android phones have tried to do this but haven’t really pulled it off with the effectiveness that the HTC Legend does.

The HTC Legend on the Internet

Using the internet is great too.  You can pinch the phone to zoom in on specific text and also get an overall view of the whole webpage before you zoom in.  When you zoom in the phone keeps on working with you so the words that you’re viewing always fit the screen perfectly.  It’s touches like this that make the phone stand out.

Browsing the internet is fast too.  There aren’t ridiculously slow loading times, it’s actually very fast.  You feel comfortable using the internet on it, rather than a bit awkward.

The word quality springs to mind with this phone in just about every department.

The Keyboard

As I have said in numerous other articles, in my opinion smartphones could do better with keyboards.  They often aren’t easy to use and take a while to get used to.

Guess what, the Legends keyboard is superb, you’re not surprised are you?

The predictive messaging is brilliant.  It knows what you’re going to say, so you can type so much easier.  It’s better than other predictive keyboards because it really does seem to know what you’re going to say.  HTC have done a fantastic job.

Smartphones aren’t going to get around the fact that they’re small, and so typing is difficult, but if you have a keyboard that corrects you with the precision that the HTC legend does, then the issue goes away.  Well done HTC, this has always been the most annoying apect of using a smartphone for me.

The Camera

It’s a 5 megapixel camera.  If you’re still reading this far into the review you’d probably be surprised if it was anything less, given the quality that the Legend has put into just about every other part of the phone.

The camera works well.  It’s not the best smartphone camera out there but it’s good.

The camera has auto focus which let’s you tap the screen and focus on certain points.

Summary

This is just about the best Android phone that’s out there.  It has quality in every department.  You can see that HTC have really decided to take this phone to the next level.

HTC have jumped heavily into Android and up until now haven’t been able to produce something that will persuade iPhone users to move away from Apple to Android.

I think this phone could be the device that does that.  Would I buy this phone? absolutely, I think it’s the best Android phone so far.

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