HTC Legend review: A Hero becomes a Legend

Introduction

It took a little Magic and a Dream but Android eventually got a Hero to champion the OS. Now, the HTC Legend comes in an aluminum suit of armor to join the ranks of the Android army. So, is this knight in shining armor set to be the vanguard of the explosive growth of Android?

HTC Legend official photos

The predecessor of the HTC Legend, the Hero, pioneered Sense UI and this latest gadget follows suit, but brings some innovation of its own.

The HTC Legend borrows a page from high-end laptop design – the aluminum unibody. The unibody design was touted as a game-changing breakthrough when it hit the laptop market. A lot of that was marketing hype, but the fact is that unibody metal designs still have a distinct quality feel to them.

Before we jump into any details, we’ll go over the key aspects of the HTC Legend and what we found lacking.

Key features

• Aluminum unibody design
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• 3G with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps
• Android OS v2.1 with latest Sense UI
• 3.2" capacitive AMOLED touchscreen of HVGA resolution
• Qualcomm MSM 7227 600 MHz CPU, 384 MB RAM
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and VGA@30fps video recording
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and GPS receiver
• Digital compass
• Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and turn-to-mute
• Proximity sensor for automatic screen locking during calls
• Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP); File transfer over Bluetooth
• Standard microUSB port for charging and data
• Standard 3.5mm audio jack
• FM Radio with RDS
• microSD card slot with support for up to 32GB cards (2GB one included)
• USB tethering support right out-of-the-box
• Social networking integration with Facebook and Twitter
• Web browser comes with Flash support
• Multi-touch zooming in gallery and web browser
• Direct access to the official Android application repository

Main disadvantages

• No video-call camera (or videocalling whatsoever)
• No dedicated shutter key or lens cover
• No TV-out port
• No voice dialing
• No DivX or XviD video support out of the box
• Dodgy flash video support

The aluminum body isn’t the only hardware upgrade the Legend got over the Hero, the TFT display technology has been switched in favor of AMOLED and that’s not all. Some of the other specs have also received a refresh.

Despite trading plastic for metal, the Legend is actually slimmer around the waist than the Hero – it’s just 11.5mm thick and it’s a pinch lighter too. Something that will evoke either a positive or negative response depending on the person is the move to an optical trackpad instead of the tried and true trackball.

HTC Legend at ours

Android doesn’t have much use for a trackball or trackpad anyway, but this goes well with the more compact profile of the HTC Legend. Even the trade-mark chin has been all but flattened.

On the next page, we’ll tell you more about the feats (and features) of the HTC Legend, starting with the unboxing and the hardware.