HTC Legend review: A Hero becomes a Legend

The dream phonebook is here

HTC Legend features the same powerful phonebook we first saw into Hero. It resembles the one from the HTC TouchFLO but also extend its functionality a lot.

Opening a contact's details presents you with the basic info for the contact - name and photo, numbers, emails and such. What you'd notice though is that there are another five tabs at the bottom and you're just viewing the first tab.

Viewing a contact

The next tab holds the SMS messages received from the contact – it would have been a lot more useful if it held the entire conversation, but for that you’d have to go to the Messages app.

The third tab holds a list of emails you've exchanged with the contact. The next two tabs are quite interesting and can turn the Legend (or in fact any phone running the Sense UI) into a social networking power tool.

The first holds Facebook contact updates, and the other called "Albums" pulls the albums that contacts have created on Flickr and Facebook.

Facebook updates • Facebook and Flickr albums • call history

The final tab shows the call history for the contact.

The entire People app (the phonebook) is tabbed too and with more tabs than the stock Android. You have all contacts, groups (including favorite contacts there), as well as a call log and "Online directories". The latter holds information for all online profiles of your buddies.

Phonebook • favorite contacts • groups • online directories

The contact editing screen looks exactly as in the Hero. There's no plus key to add a new detail of a certain type, just a delete detail key. This saves some space (one line per each category) but you have to scroll down to the bottom every time you want to add a new detail.

Editing a contact • cropping a photo

There is a lot of information you can store per contact as usual, and searching the phonebook is very easy - just press the search button.

Good telephony

Voice quality in calls is good and the volume is excellent. Reception is quite good as well. The HTC Legend has a proximity sensor for automatically locking the screen when you put your phone to the cheek during a call.

The on-screen dialer features a keypad, call log shortcut and a list of contacts beneath (you can hide the keypad). Smart Dialing is also available.

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer, turn-to-mute also works like a charm.

The dialer • calling Dexter

Just like the HTC Magic and Hero, the Legend has an interesting feature you'll notice when you make your first call - it vibrates when your call is connected. That's a good way to let you know the other side has picked up if you hold the phone in your hand and not to your ear.

But if you do hold it to your ear - then it's just irritating. It would have been great if it were disabled automatically by a proximity sensor for example. Unfortunately, we didn't find an option to at least switch it off manually either.

The call log shows the latest dialed, received and missed calls all in one.

The call log holds incoming, outgoing and missed calls

The HTC Legend such as its predecessor doesn't have voice dialing.

We conducted our traditional loudspeaker test and here is how the Legend stacks among some other handsets.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Apple iPhone 3G	66.1	62.1	71.7	Below Average
Motorola MILESTONE	69.7	78.0	66.2	Good
Google Nexus One	69.9	66.6	79.1	Good
HTC Hero	76.7	71.9	77.7	Very Good
HTC HD2	75.7	72.8	78.0	Very Good
HTC Legend	78.0	74.3	79.7	Excellent