HTC Legend review

The HTC Legend, as the name might suggest, is a direct successor to the company’s popular Hero, which formerly held the crown of Best Android Phone – that is, before Google brought out its own Nexus One. The Legend looks remarkably similar to the Hero in form, although its case is now carved from a single slab of aluminium, with a black, rubberised battery cover and the same material around the camera’s lens and flash.

The trademark “chin” is still there, although it now houses an optical trackpad rather than the trackball. Gone too are the Search and Back buttons, which have joined the Home and Menu buttons in a row just underneath the screen, which means the Legend doesn’t have buttons to start and end a call like the Hero. Instead, you use the touchscreen for these functions. However, we’re glad HTC has kept the four main Android controls as physical buttons rather than touch-sensitive controls.

Instead of the Hero’s removable backplate, the Legend’s much smaller battery cover detaches to reveal a hinged flap that keeps the battery in place and covers the SIM and memory card slots. This makes the phone feel far more sturdy than the Hero. It also covers the USB port and microphone. There’s a volume rocker to the left of the screen, and a 3.5mm headphone jack and power button above it, but no dedicated camera button – you use the trackpad as a button to capture photos or video.

A bright, AMOLED screen takes up most of the fascia, although there is a black bezel, measuring 3mm on each side, 7mm at the bottom and 9mm above the screen, which seems a waste, as it’s a smaller area than the iPhone’s screen even though it’s the same 480×320 resolution. The colours and contrast of the AMOLED technology are simply breathtaking however, and HTC has added an oleophobic (oil resistant) coating that not only reduces fingerprint marks but makes touch control much smoother.

Having an AMOLED screen has another advantage: it uses far less power than a standard TFT, and this is reflected in the Legend’s battery life of over 20 hours in our light usage test. This is a first for an Android phone, and means that you needn’t worry if you forget to plug it into the mains for a night – depending on how heavily you use the GPS, wireless and Bluetooth.

Touchscreens on Android phones typically haven’t matched the smoothness and speed of the iPhone. The Legend is another matter – it matches or even betters the iPhone in terms of responsiveness, flicking and sliding with no lag whatsoever, even with multiple apps open including the browser, calendar and Google Maps (something the iPhone still can’t manage). Even our resident iPhone champion was impressed by its speed, responsiveness and build quality, remarking that it was the first Android phone he’d seen that didn’t feel like an a “cheap iPhone knock-off”.

HTC has not only brought out the most Android phones, but it’s the only company that offers a substantial improvement on the vanilla Android interface. HTC Sense is a combination of utility software, interface design and social aggregation features that dramatically improve Android’s stock experience. As well as handling Google account synchronisation, Sense also pulls in account details and updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Microsoft Exchange (via ActiveSync).

Once you’ve entered your account details for these services, the Legend pulls in the details of all your contacts on these services. For example, we added a friend to the Favourites widget on one of the seven home screens, and immediately noticed a small green pip under their name labelled “2”. Tapping on their picture (imported from Facebook) we were first prompted to choose a default action associated with this contact – we chose one of their email addresses, as that’s how we most often contacted them.

We were then taken to their contact page, which is split into sections: Details, Messages (texts), Mail (email), Updates and Events (a Facebook feed), Photos (Facebook and Flickr) and Phone Log (a record of phone conversations). If there are any new events in any of these pages, they are flagged with a green dot and a number.

The cleverest part was that at the top of each page was a button marked “Link” with a green pip on it, suggesting that there was one link available. Clicking on this button, we were taken to a page where Sense suggested contact details that it had found in another service that applied to this person – in this case, it had found his Flickr account, and was suggesting we link it to the Facebook profile and Exchange details we already had.

This is a fantastic feature for those who have various overlapping social networks – work colleagues that you’ve added to Facebook, or Facebook friends who prefer Flickr for posting photos, for example. It’s a shame HTC hasn’t expanded this to cover more services, such as Last.fm, Bebo or MySpace. Even though you can add a Twitter account, Sense doesn’t suggest merging your Twitter contacts with other services.

Sense also incorporates some dedicated apps. Friend Stream is an application that can also be installed as a home screen widget, that aggregates all your friends’ status updates, tweets and Flickr activity, updating it in real time. The People app replaces Android stock Contacts app, and integrates your Google contact groups and lists contacts by service.

HTC’s own Twitter client, Peep, compares well with other Android clients we’ve tried: instead of small icons for re-tweets or replies, you press and hold on a tweet to bring up a context menu. The Footprints app is similar to services such as Foursquare, allowing you to tag a location using GPS, and share photos or reviews of that place, for example a tourist attraction, restaurant or shop.

Apart from social aggregation, Sense also improves the way Android works. Pinching the home screen zooms out to what’s been dubbed “helicopter view”, showing all your home screens as icons in a carousel so you can jump quickly to a specific screen, rather than flicking across multiple screens – much like MacOS’s Exposé feature, and Palm’s WebOS. You also get seven home screens, rather than the standard Android’s limit of five.

There are also some very clever touches: for example, turning the phone face down will turn off the ringtone, and when you pick the phone up to answer a call, the ringtone’s volume lowers. However there are also niggles: entering text into form fields can be annoying, as there isn’t always a Next or Tab key to go to the next field. You have to press the Power button at the top of the phone to come out of sleep mode, and many of HTC’s apps, including the main Sense interface, don’t work in landscape mode.

However, there’s little that could dissuade us from liking the Legend. With the advantages of open source Android plus HTC’s clever and highly functional Sense enhancements, the Legend matches or surpasses the iPhone OS in every field. While its design is a matter of taste, the build quality is undeniably of a similar quality. It’s also much cheaper, and we don’t hesitate in giving it our Best Buy award.