Gadget of the Week: HTC Legend

HTC’s Legend is an old toy for Europeans, but it has just landed in Canada by way of Virgin Mobile. An odd mixture of high-end build with modestly entry-level internal hardware, the Legend is luring few Motorola Droid, Nexus One, and other top-flight Android 2.1 smartphone owners from their devices, but it should satisfy most consumers who want a moderately fast and beautiful smartphone.


W H A T ‘ S - H O T :
+ The aluminum unibody takes a page out of Apple’s playbook. If I were an alien visitor, I would have thought that the Legend were a Jonathan Ive creation –and that is a compliment. By constructing the Legend through the unibody process, HTC has developed a lovely unit with a slim profile and high rigidity. The Legend looks more extravagant than it really is.

+ $349.99 Canadian (essentially $375 outright) is a new low in Android smartphone pricing thanks to Virgin Mobile’s 30-day contract term. The $79.99 3-year contract is less enticing but hardly unreasonable when viewed against other Android offerings from Rogers and Telus.

+ As with all HTC Android smartphones, Sense UI graces the Legend and to delightful effect, as the GUI is both attractive and intuitive. HTC’s cool “helicopter” view is reminiscent of Mac OS X’s Exposé, a feature that I cannot live without on my MacBook Pro. The social networking integration is thorough as well.

+ Although Qualcomm’s 600MHz MSM7227 processor pales in performance comparison to the much vaunted 1GHz Snapdragon in the bigger HTC, the Desire, the Legend manages to run Android Eclair smoothly, without many snags or delays.

+ While I would normally not brag about the 3.2″ HVGA (320×480) AMOLED screen, the Legend’s affordability more than puts its display ahead of slightly pricier smartphones. With AMOLED, users get the good (extremely high contrast, wide viewing angles, deep colors, fast response time) and the bad (inaccurate color reproduction in the Legend’s case, lower brightness than many LCD panels).

+ For an inexpensive phone, the Legend’s 5-megapixel camera shoots acceptable well-lit photos.

W H A T ‘ S - N O T :
- Because the Legend houses a lower-end 600MHz processor, Adobe Flash 10.1 is unsupported (but Flash Lite is), and future versions of Android (beyond FroYo) could be sluggish on the phone. The Legend looks like a million bucks but is held back by its CPU.

- HVGA resolution suffices for OS navigation, most apps (except Google Maps), and calls (who uses their phones for that?), but web-surfing and picture/film viewing demand more. Also, the Legend’s AMOLED display suffers from some of the same color issues (including poor grayscale reproduction) as the Nexus One.

- The LED camera takes plainly bad low-light pictures.

- A little quibble, but the plastic home/back/etc. buttons feel cheap in contrast to the rest of the unibody enclosure.

V E R D I C T :
Several things about the HTC Legend sit on the fence between good and bad: the advertised 440/490 minutes WCMDA/GSM talktime is difficult to achieve, so in real world usage, the battery life is just decent; voice and call quality, like most HTC phones except the Nexus One, is OK, not amazing. However, when one assesses the Legend as a $375 CDN (effectively) package, the only downsides to the phone are tied to unrealistic expectations. For example, we all want a Snapdragon and a WVGA (800×480) smartphone, but how can we possibly demand specs like that for the Legend’s price? The Legend is probably the best phone under $400, and the good news is that Americans can import it for use with AT&T and T-Mobile bands.