MWC: HTC Legend get mouths salivating

Richard Goodwin

It seems that HTC has one mission in life: Destroy the iPhone and make iPhone users’ green with envy. They came close with the HTC Hero, but it looks like they’ve got even closer with the HTC Legend.

The HTC Legend was aired at Mobile World Congress today, and tech-heads have been salivating over it ever since.

The device itself is formed from a single piece of aluminium which gives it a seamless, and overtly stylish, finish.

HTC know how to make good phones, they proved this with the Hero and Touch Diamond 2.

However, they’ve surpassed those standards with the Legend, which features a 3.2-inch AMOLED multi-touch display and a 5 megapixel camera complete with LED Flash - something that was desperately missing from the Hero.

Specs wise, the HTC Legend features a 600 MHz processor, 512MB ROM, Android 2.1, a MicroSD card slot and 384MB of onboard RAM.

Chris Davies from Slashgear said: 'If we had to distill it down - hardware wise at least - into a single metaphor, imagine if a MacBook Pro shrank down to smartphone size.'

The HTC Legend lands in Europe on Vodafone in April 2010.

As we said, the Legend is powered by Android 2.1 and comes with HTC’s tried-and-tested Sense UI. However, users will be able to see all seven home screens at once using a pinch-zoom motion - which a new, and very exciting, addition to the UI.

Another notable feature is Friend Stream, which places all your contacts Facebook, Twitter and Flickr updates in a single stream.

The trackball that has been so useful on the Hero has been replaced with an optical joystick.

HTC also announced another monster at MWC - The HTC Desire, which is said to feature a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, sport a 3/7-inch AMOLED screen and come with Adobe Flash 10.1.

For more news on HTC’s ever increasing arsenal of iPhone-bashing smartphones, watch this space.