After scanning the market for a phone, the finalists were HTC HD mini, HTC Legend, the Motorola Milestone and the Nokia N900.While buying a cell phone your choices as far as the operating system is concerned is Win Mo 6.5(or its iterations), the Symbian Series 60 or the Android.Everyone knows about the hazards of having a Windows operating system ie; the inevitable crashes and the bugs/viruses.Symbian as such is acceptable but the Android is the future. So if you are fairly tech saavy and willing to spend some time coming to grips with the system, it is worth the money.So my personal take on the selection of the operating system was Android. Having come to this conclusion, out of the android phones available with a reasonable set of features, the HTC legend was the final choice.The balance was tilted in favour of Legend by the HTC sense UI. This user interface is really good without any glitches.
The HTC Legend(model no: A6363) has Android 2.1(Eclair) with HTC sense with a CPU speed of 600 MHz and 512 MB ROM and 384 MB RAM -display is 8.12 cm AMOLED touch sensitive screen. It has HSPA/WCDMA(900/2100 MHz), GSM/GPRS/EDGE(850/900/1800/1900 MHz), Internal GPS antenna.Connectivity is bluetooth, Wi Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g, 3.5 mm stereo audio jack and comes with standard micro USB. The camera is a 5 MP snapper with autofocus and flash and geo tagging. Expansion slot is micro SD card. The entire phone is sculpted unibody aluminium design with an optical trackball.The design is minimalist and quite attractive.
The phone comes bundled with a set of ear phones, charger and 2GB micro SD card.
The phone reception is quite good; the camera takes decent snaps(5, 3, 1 MP and a small 640X 416 setting) and the videos can be taken at an acceptable quality of 640x480 VGA MPEG4. The music player is just barebones and the FM radio requires you to connect the earphones for antenna.There is no front camera.The phone has an onscreen qwerty keyboard which can be oriented either in portrait or landscape mode.The battery life is just about average with about 24-30 hours of normal usage.
The best part of the phone is the HTC sense UI built over the Android platform. HTC sense is superb and no sign of hesitation in opening any widget/program or flicking to any screen.Although in these days of 1GHz processors, 600 MHz might sound inadequate, it performs admirably well.The phone looks and feels quite stylish and rugged and build quality is good.The back of the phone has rubberised strips at the two ends(camera end and the bottom end) which is quite useful to avoid scratches when you place the phone down and prevent slipping when in a car.
HTC has supplied 6 scenes - viz; HTC, social, work, play, travel and clean slate.In addition you can also customise all seven screens and save it as a scene of your choice. Each scene has 7 screens which can be customised to your liking with widgets/programs/shortcuts.The home screen button gives a "helicopter" view with all the seven screens and then you can just tap any screen to get it. Social networking is adequately represented with GMail, Facebook, You Tube and a new Friendstream by HTC.
In short if you are looking for an intelligent phone with a touch screen and you dont want to be a part of the i-family, look no further.
Downside? If you have got accustomed to windows and the associated programs, you better stick to a WINMo phone. You will find it easier to sync with your computer, back up, find applications etc with a Win Mo phone or even a symbian phone. The Android also takes some time getting used to and the apps are only coming up in the market.The worst thing that can happen to you while carrying this phone is for it to be mistaken for an i-phone.(but it will be by the non-cognoscenti)
Yes, this is a smart phone, if this phone is smarter than you, you will dislike it; if you are smarter than this phone, you will like it.
April 2012-still going strong/ no troubles so far and still looking good :-)