Part of the Android 2.0 upgrade was a stronger focus on social networking within the contacts menu – but HTC has been doing that for months now, and the HTC Legend is no different.

The main thing about the contacts menu with the HTC Legend is that we’re seeing an integrated view – it doesn’t add in your Twitter friends as well, but the upshot of that is you’re not left with loads of contacts in your phonebook.

We would have perhaps preferred to see something like Motorola does with MOTOBlur, where you can choose to pop in your Twitter friends if you want to, but don’t have to see all of them – it makes it easier to see their updates that way.

There are five different distinct contacts you can have in the phone book – those from the SIM, Google, on the phone, Exchange and from your Facebook list.

While we appreciate Google asking you to download your contacts from Gmail when you use the phone for the first time, we don’t recommend you do unless you’ve spent some time organising them, as you’ll end up with reams of single email address entries with no name. There is an option to only see those names with phone numbers, but that’s only apparent afterwards and the sheer number of entries might confuse some people. But if you want to make use of the phonebook options from Google and Facebook, then prepare to spend a good amount of time with the phone – you’ll need to first of all merge all your phone numbers, names and email addresses together online, and then once those are downloaded to the phone, link them to the relevant Facebook account. In fairness to HTC, it has spent a long time working out how to make Facebook integration as simple as possible – wherever someone has a phone number on their online profile, and that matches an entry on the phone, the HTC Legend will automatically merge them together. And after that, it will make accurate suggestions based on email addresses too, so as you go through the phone linking up the profiles, you’ll be able to simply press ‘Link’ to get the suggestions and tie the two together. Where there is no email address listed, you’ll have to do it manually, which takes some time, but when you’ve sorted out Google and Facebook then the integrated approach really comes to the fore – status updates, emails, text conversations, call history – even your friend’s Facebook and Flickr photos are visible from the phonebook entry. The Facebook link will also update the person’s profile picture on the phone based on their online profile – which we mentioned earlier. The list of friends is for some reason divided into two – we think it’s those with emails and without, but it’s annoying that we can just see our friends all in one easy-to-see list, alphabetically. It would take a very long time to list all the features packed into the HTC Legend’s phone book – but the Taiwanese firm has made it very, very easy to see everything from one contact in a variety of ways, something that has come from its heritage in Windows Mobile. Call quality is also good on the HTC Legend – although we’re not sure the design of the phone is right for pushing against your ear. The fact the phone is made from aluminium means it has some fairly sharp edges – if you’re ever trying to listen hard to someone, then it can be painful. The speaker is loud and audible though, with a nice design as mentioned. Call coverage is pretty good as well – the 3G signal is on a par with most. It’s not going to offer you reception in places you’ve struggled with in the past, but it rarely dropped and we didn’t have any instances of randomly dropped calls, which is always a plus. The HTC Legend also supports smart dialling – bash the virtual numbers as if you were writing in predictive text, and the list of corresponding names comes up. This feature is on a number of high-end smartphones, and we’re surprised that more don’t include it – it’s actually now irritating when they don’t.

Messaging

In the phone book, we mentioned the sheer amount of options to connect with people – well, that’s apparent as well with messaging too. The HTC Legend offers the chance to interact over Exchange email, Webmail, SMS, MMS, Twitter and Facebook. Well, less of the latter beyond seeing Facebook status updates, but the rest of it is offered natively within the phone.

We’re a little annoyed Facebook messaging isn’t offered from the phone itself without connecting to a web portal – it seems like an easy element to integrate, especially when Twitter is there already. Anyway, at least the rest of the messaging options work well – emailing is a dream. Your Google mail is set up when you activate the phone for the first time and you log into your Google account, so that’s nice and easy. And for others, be it Exchange or Webmail, the process is as simple as entering your username or email address and password, and the phone will automatically seek out the setting for you.

Texting is similarly easy – the best way of achieving it seems to be to go to the person’s contact details in your phone book, as you can also see the message history with them, or start a new conversation. Text conversations are threaded on the HTC Legend, which means that you can easily monitor correspondence without needing to flick backwards and forward through the inbox and sent box. With each message a little icon of yourself and the person comes up with their picture . This is another cool feature that adds to the overall slickness of the HTC Legend. Twitter is also included thanks to the HTC’s Peep – this gives instant access to elements like @replies, direct messages and favourite Tweeters – notifications of mentions and DMs to your account  also appear in the notification bar.

And we’ve saved the best until last – the virtual keyboard. We don’t know why HTC hasn’t put together an Android phone with a physical set of keys to type away on, but with a touchscreen option this good, we don’t really need one. We’ve told you how good HTC’s Android touch keyboard is before – in our opinion it was industry-leading. But somehow the Taiwanese firm has managed to go one better with the HTC Legend – it’s spectacular.

Put it this way – out of the box we managed to type out a whole text message without even spelling a word wrong or having to correct it. Well, to be more precise – we spelled nearly EVERY word wrong, but no matter how far you deviate from the intended word, the prediction engine on the HTC Legend will put you right. If you’ve ever shied away from a touchscreen because you hate texting on it – the HTC Legend is the phone to convert you, such is the power of the touchscreen keyboard.

Internet

The web browser is built on the same WebKit base as most other Android phones, but once again HTC has added its own little touches to the system on the HTC Legend to make it a different experience to other phones of its ilk. The main interface is simple – web pages are presented as expanded options, allowing you to take a gander over the whole site without needing to zoom out to check things out.

Another thing we’re pleased to see is the addition of pinch to zoom functionality, meaning expanding text is as easy as you could hope for. And HTC has also included its own text reflow software in there too – for those that don’t know what that means, you can basically keep zooming into text and the HTC Legend will keep resizing the text to make the words fit onto the screen. This means you’re not governed by the phone’s choices of what you’re supposed to be able to read – great news for those with slight sight deficiencies or the picky among us. One slight downside – we’ve let iPhone users play with the HTC Legend and they’ve said the text resizing takes longer than on their phone – if this doesn’t apply to you, we doubt you’ll notice it. And the speed of the internet browser on the HTC Legend is also definitely industry leading – we tried websites that are notoriously poor to view on the mobile web, and we were able to sprint through them – this phone is seriously adept at browsing the mobile web. The screen – which as we mentioned is HVGA resolution – still renders web pages well and in good detail, meaning we never put the phone down to hit the full web browser instead on a PC.

Another high-end treat on the HTC Legend: Flash video is included by default, with both in-browser viewing and a full screen option available by double tapping on the screen.

The bad news – the Flash video on the phone is choppy and pretty unwatchable. It’s not likely to be a deal-breaker for long, as Flash 10.1 is coming for mobile phones soon to the HTC Legend and this will likely fix the problem. But at the moment, the Flash video might as well not be there – all it does is slow down websites we’re trying to browse. Other little web elements we like: the Legend will organise your bookmarks by visual thumbnails, which sit on the home screen – making them much easier to browse through.

It will also remember which sites you visit the most as well as grouping your history together nicely – the former makes it easy to add in your fave sites when you keep forgetting to do so when you’re actually in them.

Cut and paste is also included by default, and it’s easily the match of anything out there on the market today. You’re able to see the text in a little magnification pane, with little pins to drag to select the text you’re after exactly. We’re not experts in patent law – but this looks mightily similar to Apple’s method unveiled last year.

This is a good thing – that system worked, and this one adds in the option to copy the text to a clipboard, search the web for the phrase, or share the site with others via social networking. Android has always excelled at mobile web browsing – but HTC has just raised the game with the browser on the Legend.

Camera

If you’re an HTC enthusiast then you’ll know that the company has never been too strong on photography. With the HTC Legend, the company has gone some way to remedying that problem, with a 5MP camera with LED flash, supported by a number of neat camera features. But it does have some nice touches – for instance, while there’s no dedicated camera key the main  button allows you to half press it to auto focus, meaning it functions like a ‘proper’ shutter button.

The auto focus is pretty good too – the camera is able to focus on any point on the screen you wish, simply by tapping it – the HTC Legend will then automatically take the picture for you, which is a neat touch. There’s no dedicated macro mode for close up shots, but our tests showed that this is likely already integrated into the system, as we found it very easy to take pictures of nearby items. The other elements, such as being able to use sliders to control colour saturation, white balance and contrast, all show that HTC has upped its game in terms of being able to take a better picture when you’re out and about, and while the flash is a little stark, it’s certainly an upgrade on the flash-less Hero.

MIXED SCENES: The HTC Legend managed to pick out levels of detail despite mixed lighting conditions

HALO EFFECT: We were surprised at the photo quality when shooting directly into very bright sunshine

DARKER IMAGE: The HTC Legend also handles distant objects without losing too much quality

BRIGHTER SCENES: The Legend is at its best shooting well-lit subjects

CLOSE UP ISSUES: Although the auto focus is good, the noise level increases dramatically with closer objects

FLASH IN THE PAN: The HTC Legend has a bright enough flash, but can’t focus well in the darkness Video recording isn’t much to write home about though – but don’t think that’s a bad thing.
We’d much prefer a brand to spend time making a phone work well with the basic things like calling, texting or browsing the web – 30fps HD recording isn’t necessary, and this smooth-ish VGA capture option on the HTC Legend is more than enough to take the video you want to share with your friends (in MP4 or H.263 formats).

Media

The HTC range, and Android too, has never had media at its heart – although there are finally signs that things are starting to get better, and that’s certainly true on the HTC Legend. The music player sits apart from the video gallery, which for some reason is bundled under ‘Photos’. With the HTC Hero, we saw a distinct improvement in the music player – in the HTC Legend that improvement has continued.

We’ve mentioned before that the basic Android music interface, used on the likes of the LG Intouch Max GW620  is just too bog standard – we want more than album, artist and title. Thankfully, we’ve got it here: the HTC Legend music player offers up not only a full screen music player, but also the choice of artists, albums, tracks, playlists, genres and even purchased music from online services.

This makes sorting your tunes a much more pleasant experience than before – and the audio experience is also comparable to most other phones on the market as well. We think Sony Ericsson still leads the way in terms of decent music phones, but there’s nothing wrong with the sound on the HTC Legend. There’s no equaliser to play around with sound if you’re having trouble with a tune and the speaker’s not up to much – but for general use there’s very little wrong with the HTC Legend. The video player is also just fine for its purpose too – nothing over the top to blow your mind, but it performs all its tasks in a Ronseal-esque manner.

We tested a few video codecs on the phone – MP4, AVI and H.264 all worked fine with no judder. We’re not sure about DivX, but early signs are that this isn’t supported within the native Android player – we’re sure the App Market can help out with that though.

Video on the 3.2-inch OLED screen is pretty nice – it’s quite apparent this isn’t a high-res WVGA screen, which we’re becoming used to on high-end smartphones. Video looks fine, but lacks that extra pixel clarity. The OLED does help matters though – the contrast ratios were lovely and the colours well represented. But 3.2-inch screen isn’t any good for things like watching full length movies – we weren’t even that comfortable watching half hour videos. Whether it’s the thinner bezel or something else, we found ourselves pining for something larger – and the phone felt very tiddly in the palm for video.

The main other media elements lay with the FM radio and the YouTube application. The former is only OK – the sensitivity of the antenna (for which you have to connect the headphones) is pretty low, and couldn’t find a few mainstream stations. It also lacked RDS, which means you have to manually add the station names – which is irritating.

The YouTube application is cool though – not only do you have the option to watch videos in high quality over both Wi-Fi and 3G you can also rate, comment and share the video link all from the video itself – another example of the next-generation functionality Android is now offering.

Aplications

It’s difficult to know how to rate the HTC Legend in terms of applications – do we look at it as a standalone device, with a pretty well-stocked Android Market app portal, or do we compare it to the iPhone with its gargantuan App Store? The thing to note is that while Android Market is around seven times smaller than the App Store, it’s growing quickly and also offers more developer freedoms – this means more will start coding for the platform as time goes on.

But this is also about the applications on the HTC Legend already too – and these aren’t insubstantial at all. We’ve covered the excellent Peep app, but there are others on there from HTC and Google that just rock.

For instance, the version of Google Maps on the HTC Legend is awesome – you get all the best features that the likes of Symbian, Windows Mobile and iPhone users can only dream of. For instance, you get access to Google Labs, which adds in elements like compass direction, measurements and terrain scaling as well – plus the addition of layers to give you Wikipedia and transport links on the map.

The GPS receiver is so fast on the HTC Legend as well, finding you in a matter of seconds when you’re out and about – it even worked near windows too, and the maps loaded really quickly over 3G.

The other cool application on the phone is the weather app – this is a favourite of HTC CEO Peter Chou, who loves showing off the fact that the weather widget will even cloud up the screen or speckle it with rain depending on the current conditions. You can add in other cities and locations too, and the cool thing is you also get a four-day forecast as well – making it a really handy too.

There’s a desk clock as well, which has a night mode for bedside viewing – without a dock this is a little pointless, but hey – it’s a nice touch. The clock also comes with a stopwatch and countdown timer as well – something so few phones manage to bring. The Android 2.1 Market portal is slick too – the categories are clear and well defined, and the definition between free and paid-for apps shows the plethora of applications available for the HTC Legend.

Batery Life

Here we come to one of the downsides of the HTC Legend – the battery life isn’t up to much. Our take on smartphones is that they should be charged up every day, and the HTC Legend manages to last that long – but only just in most cases.

Put it this way – we tried to push it as hard as we could to see how long the battery would hold out for. This meant from fully charged, we activated Bluetooth music playback, browsed the internet constantly, downloaded applications, streamed video, downloaded a 164MB file and played with Google Maps repeatedly to see how long the battery could hold out.

We also pushed the screen to full brightness with no time out, activated push email and set Twitter and Facebook to update as often as possible. The HTC Legend managed to hold out for eight and a half hours before dying completely – which we suppose is average. What is weird is that if you turn off the background apps – music, Bluetooth and so on – the HTC Legend still managed to drain completely in nine hours.
Under average use, this do-it-all phone will last a day, but it’s certainly not industry-leading – the iPhone is probably just a little bit worse, and that’s nowhere near a compliment.

But on the other hand, this is a phone that you want to keep playing with – you buy it based on that fact, and we challenge you to find a phone that you’ll want to play with this much with a much longer battery life.

Other features

The HTC Legend comes with a few other neat features that we like – the calendar is brilliant for instance.

It synchronises with both your Google and Exchange calendars as soon as you tell it to, and any upcoming meetings will come up as notifications on the phone – with the alarm for this lowering dramatically in volume when you pick up the phone, recognising that you’re probably with company and embarrassed.

Quick Office is also included in the package, giving easy access to Word, Excel and Powerpoint files – however, we couldn’t see an option to edit these, so we’d imagine hardcore business users might want to download something a little more powerful.

A PDF viewer is also included in the menu as well, with an easy-to-use interface allowing you to quickly zoom in and out.

Perhaps a hot-swappable microSD card would be nice (you have to open the battery cover to get to it, and this turns off the phone) but that’s about all we can think of.

Conectivity Options

The connectivity options on the HTC Legend are the same as on any other Android phone – this means the usual suspects of Wi-Fi, 7.2Mbps HSPDA fast download speeds, Bluetooth and GPS.

Wi-Fi is a little suspect on the Legend – when in direct sight of the router, we still didn’t have full signal, and there have been some anecdotal reports of Wi-Fi dropping out at times when moving further away.

Similarly Bluetooth was also pretty poor – listening to music over the A2DP stereo connection using Jabra Halo headphones was a very, very patchy affair.

This meant that audio constantly stopped and stuttered – it was listenable, but only just… we wouldn’t recommend the HTC Legend as a Bluetooth headphones device to anyone.

GPS, as we mentioned just now, is pretty good though – it’s capable of quickly locating you, even with trees or buildings around.

The a-GPS, used to give your weather location on the home screen, is less effective though – often taking time to refresh where you are, and therefore making the updated weather information hard to come by.

But the 3G signal was good and strong, with files downloading quickly and maintaining a couple of bars throughout long train journeys, which is always a good sign.

The PC Sync options were nice as well – you could either charge the phone, use it as a modem to access the internet, connect it as a mass storage device or use HTC Sync.

Gallery

Conclusion

The HTC Legend is the Taiwanese firm’s latest effort at making a high-end smartphone – the sheer number of features and care taken with the interface should prove that.

We liked

Where do we start? The design is lovely – the unibody chassis is going to win a fair few fans, we bet.

The screen is clear and responsive; the Sense UI overlay adds a huge amount of functionality to the Android OS, and the 600MHz processor whips along.

The web browser is among the fastest out there, the touchscreen keyboard is industry-leading, and the ability to merge contacts and see elements like Facebook photos from your phonebook is superb.

Nearly every single aspect of the HTC Legend was either class-leading or rubbing shoulders with the leaders – it’s so clear that a lot of thought has gone into its construction.

We disliked

However, there are a few niggles. We managed to crash the weather widget a couple of times, and the Friendstream application took a while to update at times.

The battery life is pushing right on the limits as well – we’re not sure anyone will ever be able to use it up completely in day-to-day use, but it will irritate some people that the meter drains quicker than most.

The screen could be a little bigger, and pack a higher resolution too – but that’s very much a subjective opinion, as many won’t be upset about that.

Verdict

We had a really, really long think about the mark to give this phone, as it’s so good in so many ways that we felt it deserved five stars.

But to give it that would mean recommending it over the iPhone – and while we believe it to be a better phone, it doesn’t have the weight of the App Store behind it – and that’s going to put a lot of people off.

If you’re someone that doesn’t really care massively about apps or gets irritated by a day-long battery life, we couldn’t recommend this phone more.

And as a standalone device, we get a really strong feeling this is going to be our phone of the year – and if not, 2010 is going to be a really, really good year for smartphones.

Hands-on video with the HTC Legend

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