HTC Legend

The Hero might be dead, but the Legend lives on: HTC has replaced its best-selling Android phone with a new, updated handset that follows the big trends of 2010.  Calling it the Legend doesn't leave them much room to make mistakes though …

A unibody shell?  That sounds familiar …

HTC went for a Teflon finish on the Hero, giving users a phone that was a pleasure to touch and easy to hold.  As a welcome surprise, the Legend not only marks a change of tack, but uses a structure that we've seen elsewhere: the so-called unibody frame is a single block of metal.  A plastic 'cartridge' has been cleverly slotted into this frame, and the mix of materials adds an unusual touch.

The version we tested had red trim around the outside because it was provided by an operator, but other colours are available, depending on where you get your phone from.  And the famous 'chin' that HTC includes on its Android phones is there, but this time it sticks out a little less.


The navigation keys have been redesigned.  In place of the six found on the Legend, the Hero now has just four, with no dedicated keys for accepting and rejecting calls.  That means the keys for the home-screen and the context-based menus have moved over to the left.  The zoom and back buttons join them on a single row.  These changes haven't affected the way you use the phone, but the surface of this particular part of the phone isn't of extremely high quality, with the ridges between each button rapidly filling with dust.


HTC Sense: evolution, not revolution


The arrival of Android 2.1 hasn't pushed HTC's in-house user interface Sense out of the way.  Instead, the manufacturer has even tweaked it a little.  The number of windows on show goes from five to seven, and if you press Home when you're already on a homescreen, you see a live preview of all seven tabs laid out in a circle, making it easy to choose the one you want.  You can get to the same part of the interface by using two fingers to zoom out to it.  If you add to that the very rich profiles you can create to go with the different ways you use your phone, you've got a handset with a lot of excellent, practical customisation options.

HTC has also taken the opportunity to include some very attractive colourful backgrounds, which really show off the Legend's gorgeous AMOLED display, which is not quite as bright as the Omnia II's Super AMOLED display.  It's helped along by ambient light and presence sensors.  HTC has integrated the intelligent ringtone management that we already saw on the HD2: when the phone starts ringing, the volume decreases when you pick up the handset, or becomes entirely silent if you turn it over and put it face down on the table.  It's a very simple solution but it works excellently.


Chrome Lite is as powerful a browser as ever, and includes support for Flash--the Lite version, but it's still Flash all the same.  We're not sure whether it's because of extra work done on the Legend, or general improvements in Android 2.1, but the phone slows down a lot less, even with several apps running at once.

The virtual keyboard is unchanged, but that isn't too much of problem as HTC's is more than acceptable.  Its capacity for predicting the word you want to type is impressive and means you don't have to be too careful about hitting the right key.


Multimedia still needs work

There haven't been many changes with the multimedia elements of the phone, with no new audio or video file formats supported.  You'll need to rely on third-party players for DivX files, for instance, so it's good news that VLC for Android is nearly ready.  The Hero's camera has been replaced by a 5 Megapixel version here, but the extra pixels don't really improve the quality of the photos on offer.  We noticed a lot of problems with the white balancing too, and once again, that's not the first time we've seen problems like that on a HTC handset, although it's far from being the only offender in this field.  The HD2 used to suffer from a similar defect, but a firmware update put paid to that.  Still, the camera on the Legend is as capable as any of its competitors at taking quick snaps of things you want to remember, especially as it now has an LED flash.

While we're talking about multimedia performance, let's look at the hardware differences between the Hero and the Legend.  The processor still comes from Qualcomm, but in place of the MSM7220 chip, we now find its successor, the MSM7227, which runs at 600 MHz.  We're not going to say no to the extra MHz, of course, but it's still a relatively modest increase.  It's a good job so much extra performance has been squeezed out of Android 2.1.

Finally, while we're pleased to see an FM tuner, we would have rather it had RDS.

As you'd expect, there's an A-GPS chip, and it works relatively well, even if it isn't the fastest at finding the satellite signal.  Let's finish the review by looking at battery life, which hasn't fallen since the Hero thanks to the switch to an AMOLED display.  Social networks demand a lot of network resources which inevitably uses up the battery though, and only RIM has managed to solve this problem by rolling out push across the whole handset.  In short: don't go too far without taking your charger.

The HTC Hero was already doing well for a four-star phone when we tested it, and we think it would probably have got five stars if we looked at it after all of the software updates.  That means you shouldn't be too surprised by the Legend's score.  Reworking the ultra-connected Swiss army knife concept but adding Android 2.1, the Legend is another sign of HTC's undoubted experise in the area.  The next step is for the manufacturer to work on the hardware for the Legend's replacement (what will they call it, the Myth ?), because without it, any upgrades to the interface will be cancelled out by sluggish performance.  But that's for another day, and in the meantime, the Legend has got plenty of life in it yet!