HTC Legend

 

Unless HTC brings down the price, this Legend will be soon forgotten

 

Aluminum uni-body, 3.2-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, multi-touch support (gallery & browser), optical trackball, accelerometer, compass, 3.5mm jack, tethering Support, social media integration, Wi-Fi, 5MP auto & touch focus

No secondary camera for video-call, no shutter button, not hot-swappable memory card, poor battery life, pricing 

HTC is rolling out several handsets, most of which are Android based. Today we have the HTC Legend, built on the success of the HTC Hero, but looks to take things a notch higher. The phone boasts of the latest Android OS v2.1 (Eclair) and the latest in Sense UI. HTC's own perfected UI lies over the Android OS. The other stand out features of the Legend is its uni-body design, built from a single piece of aluminum . Its AMOLED capacitive screen and Optical Trackball makes it much easier to navigate the handset. The Legend seems to have it all in the spec sheet but can it really become a legendary device? You'll surely know by the end of the review.

 
Bundle

• HTC Legend
• Stereo Headset
• USB Cable
• Charger
• Charger Adapter

 Build & Design
The HTC Legend is a unique handset when it comes to design. Influenced by the Apple MacBook Pro range, the Legend has a uni-body design and is built out of single piece of aluminum. This makes the handset very rigid. A few parts are rubberized plastic to mainly provide good signal reception and better grip on the handset. The Legend provides a good grip and features the same chin design as seen in the HTC Hero, although it is slightly less pronounced here. This provides for better phone aesthetics, especially while holding the phone against your face while on a call. A neat touch of style is the chrome lining around the edge of the bezel. 

Above the large 3.2" AMOLED capacitive screen of the Legend is the earpiece of the handset and behind the earpiece grill there is an LED indicator for notifications. This LED indicator denotes Battery Status (Low/Charging) and notifications, including Missed Calls and Messages received. The placement of buttons under the screen in now smarter. The buttons are finished in glossy black and are backlit. This makes them clearly visible even in the dark.

In the HTC Hero, we had complaints about the Search & Back button being oddly placed. In the HTC Legend all the buttons Home, Menu, Back & Search are in the same line but that has left the calling buttons missing. It is a bit of discomfort but at the end of the day you can touch to answer or drop a call. Even the iPhone or many touch screen devices don't have callings buttons. Even more so the Windows Mobile 7 handsets won't have the calling buttons. I think we all can live with it. 

One new thing that we have on the Legend - something HTC has newly introduced on its handsets - is the use of an optical trackball. This is placed below, on the chin of the handset, and is fairly tiny. It also doubles as a confirmation/enter button. The optical trackball is a replacement to the trackball that we have seen in the HTC Hero and facilitates in easier scrolling. The trackball, though tiny, has a really good sensitivity making it easier to scroll through web pages.

The sides of the Legend feature a volume control on the left, a power ON/OFF/Standby button and a 3.5mm jack at the top. At the bottom there is a microUSB port both for connectivity as well as charging. The Legend doesn't have a lens shutter key on the side. Being a 5MP shooter I'd expect capturing to be made simpler with the use of a shutter button. The Legend doesn't seem so much of a camera phone. Even the placement of the volume button on the left makes it uncomfortable to zoom in/out, as it moves to the bottom when holding the phone in landscape. 

 

Interface
The HTC Legend is an Android OS handset. It has the latest that Android has to offer - v2.1 a.k.a. Eclair. This coupled along with HTC's very own Sense UI for Android makes for a great equation. The phone has a poor internal memory of just 384MB but there is a microSD card slot for expandability. The microSD card slot is placed under the battery, so you'll have to shut down the phone before you choose to yank out the memory card.

The Legend has a 600MHz processor doing duty in this handset; I wouldn't even consider this as a jump in the processing power as compared to the 528MHz in the Hero. The phone is smooth for most of the time, though the kinetic scrolling at times falters. The optical trackball of the handset is also something that helps with the scrolling quite a bit, but the slight lag is still noticeable. It is an Android v2.1 OS but it doesn't feature Live Wallpapers like in the Google's Nexus One. As of now there is a no update from HTC but there's a possibility that an update could bring in Live Wallpapers for the Legend.

The Sense UI on the Legend is what separates the HTC Android handsets from the other droids on the market. The Sense UI provided has various Scenes to choose from to suit your profile; HTC, Social, Work, Play, Travel & Custom. Each of these scenes have widgets relating to the name of the scene. The widget Friends Stream a widget for the HTC Sense UI provides Social Networking connectivity, wherein you can update your status on both Twitter and Facebook. The Sense UI provides with seven desktop screens and you have lots of widgets to add to these screens. This is similar to what we've seen in previous Android phones from HTC. The internal menus don't see much difference, it's just the same as the default Android.

The application list for the Legend doesn't seem much different from what Android as a OS offers, which is the whole Google Package. There are some apps added by HTC - Stocks, Weather, QuickOffice, Plurk (Social Journal), Peep (Twitter), Friend Stream, and Teeter in games. The Android market still continues to grow and that will be your supply of unlimited games as well as apps. Also, there is Java to support installation of Java applications making possible the use of several more apps and games at your disposal.
 

 

Input
The HTC Legend has the same on-screen keyboards like in the Hero or the Magic. You get the same three keyboard layouts, standard QWERTY, half QWERTY and standard phone keypad. The full QWERTY is also available in landscape mode. Although the on-screen QWERTY of the HTC Legend is decent, its still not as good as the iPhone. Fortunately there isn't so much of a lag noticed while typing. The Legend also has spell check, which provides suggestions while typing and works fine for most of the time.

Browser
The HTC Legend has the latest offering of Android OS browser compared to the one on the Hero. It has support for Flash content. The browser can now display all the Flash content on a page, like ads and banners and even play videos on the desktop version of YouTube, directly on the site itself. Another addition is the visual bookmarks feature, which displays bookmarks as a filmstrip of icons showing the page. Even the browser windows have a new filmstrip layout compared to the thumbnail layout of the previous browser. The zooming on the page is now done by the pinching gestures, just like in the image gallery, thanks to the multi-touch support. The browser is fast as usual with page loading speed faster than most handsets. 

GPS
The HTC Legend has built-in GPS just like the Hero. The GPS is utilized when in Google Maps. The Maps app now supports layers and whole lot of additions through the Google Labs. So you can choose to use the basic or add-on a lot of other stuff to make your Google Maps much better. The GPS lock-on time was quite fast and sitting while moving on the bike or driving through the city. The Google Maps, however, lacks turn-by-turn voice navigation, which is something that you can overcome through applications from the Android Market. The GPS in the phone can also be used in the camera for geo-tagging of images.

Performance
Network & Calls
The Legend is a unibody handset and this could pop up the question of the call reception. The antenna of the handset is placed at the bottom of the phone behind the rubberized plastic. Call quality and network reception on the Legend is good. Barely came across call drops. The phone has a proximity sensor that turns off the display to prevent accidental presses. The volume keys are easy to access in a call and the chin curved naturally towards the mouth. The loudspeaker isn't as loud as expected but is acceptable. 

Multimedia
The music player has slightly been updated and now sports a much better look than the standard Android music player. Functionality-wise it's the same. Music organization into various categories is provided, there is also album art displayed and has all the other basic features such as repeat and shuffle. There isn't any audio enhancement feature like an equalizer or Audio Booster as seen in the Windows Mobile handsets from HTC. The audio quality of the Legend is still quite good and with a good pair of headphones you can enjoy good quality music. The handset has a 3.5mm jack, which lets you choose your preferred headphones or earphones. 

Video playback on the Legend isn't all that good. The main constraint coming in with limited video format. There is no DivX/XviD support, so you'll have to go through with the painful task of conversion. Converted videos look great on the large, high quality display.

The image gallery on the Legend has been slightly upgraded. You can now view photos from your Facebook and Fickr accounts. There is also the support for pinch to zoom, as the handset supports multi-touch. Flipping through image is smooth, there wasn't much of pixellation noticed and barely a second for the image to clear out. 

Camera
The HTC Legend has a 5 megapixel autofocus camera. There is a single LED flash provided, which is powerful for only pictures taken in close proximity to the object being captured. The camera does not have a lens cover, which could be a cause of concern. Though it is placed in a depression with an outer metal ring, it is still not good enough to protect it well. The camera software is the same as seen in the HTC Hero with the same touch to focus option as well.

The phone automatically focuses on to the new subject in the screen whenever you move the phone. Apart from this there is one serious complaint and that is the missing shutter key. This makes life troublesome to quite an extent. The optical Trackball button is the only way to hit the capture command. It gets worse as there is no control over the focusing mechanism. The camera focuses on its own leaving you only with the option to capture it. The quality of the images captured is decent and not much of an improvement over the Hero. Colors were pale and inaccurate and the details weren't that great as well. The iPhone 3GS camera performed better in comparison.


Battery Life

The HTC Legend is poor on battery life. After a complete charge and connected to Gtalk, Gmail, and Social Networking sites. I managed to get only about a day of usage; that's with just a couple of hours of talktime. Increase that talktime or add music playback and the phone will die out on you in just half a day. Overall, I feel that even after keeping away from social networking sites and other apps like GTalk and Gmail, the phone will die in a day's time with about 4 hours of talktime and some music playback, which is pretty poor.

Price & Verdict
The HTC Legend sells for Rs. 25,990 with a one-year warranty. The pricing of the handset feels out of place. The only reason for this high price seems to be the unibody design. But apart from that its more or less an ordinary Android phone. I wonder why would I not settle for the Samsung Galaxy i7500, which is over 10k cheaper.

Agreed, its not an Android 2.1 phone but it has a powerful processor and a 5MP camera though without flash. I mean, seriously, are we being taken for a ride here? It's not like we are dumb. The Legend only has the design, and to quite some extent I'll give credit to the Sense UI, but even then the pricing doesn't seem justified. Under 20k and it'll be a real success. If I want an Android phone I'd put in an additional 4k and buy the Google Nexus One, a much more powerful device and overall a better phone.