HTC Legend review

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.