Today we got some quality hands-on time with the HTC Legend after we sneaked a peek yesterday. We compared it our Android benchmark – the HTC Hero. The design is similar in some ways, but not in others. The Legend is built from a single piece of aluminium for a seamless compact frame. It’s solid, cool and smooth to touch. There’s less buttons but a whole lot more inside. The HTC Sense interface has been boosted and you now get HTC Widgets updated frequently – just click for more widgets and it’ll bring down all the new ones that are available.
During our chat with Eric Lin from HTC we were amazed yet again by the tiny but important things HTC have done. The battery is removable (see iPhone, it CAN be done) – it slides out of the small black panel at the bottom, as does the SIM and the microSD. This is like a ship in a bottle – the battery cover itself is the antenna. Talk about space-saving, this really is cutting edge.
The Hero track-ball is gone, but the optical joystick just.. worked. It clicks too, so you can select stuff and it still does the “glowing light” trick to tell you when texts and emails have arrived etc.
Coming to Vodafone in April 2010 this is one very, very nice handset. While we were there we asked HTC about the Flash support within Android – sometimes not all websites using Flash display correctly. The reason? It’s memory. Most Flash bits will work, but if you’ve got a huge Flash game or similar then it won’t display. I guess I’d rather have that than the whole thing grinding to a halt.
We also wanted to get a look at our other worry – the camera quality. I can, at last, confirm that this camera is brilliant. I was in a dark room (as you can see) and took a snap. I didn’t hold it steady, I didn’t fiddle with the settings – it produced a perfect shot. Ahhhh.. I’m liking this and can’t wait to get more time with it.
So, to the pictures – we’ve got another stack of close-up shots plus comparison shots with the HTC Hero. Oh, and if that’s not enough we’ve got all the phones side-by-side.
Video is coming soon..
Links – HTC Legend Hands-on (2) – HTC Hero Comparison – All devices