HTC Desire & HTC Legend Compared
The HTC Desire and the HTC Legend are two of the top dogs in the Android pack. The two smartphones boast pretty impressive tech specs, leaving consumers just itching to get their paws on them.
The HTC Legend is a phone that packs technology and beauty into a sleek and slim aluminum uni-body chassis. This design feature allows for an expensive look, so it might be a while before you consider popping this hot rod into a case.
Along with aesthetic appeal, this superphone packs a punch, and in a perfectly pocket-sized package at just 56.3x112x11.5 mm.
The Desire on the other hand, measures in at 60x119x12mm, making the phone easy to slide in and out of your pocket.
But the slender size of this smarty doesn’t limit its brain power, after all, isn’t it always the scrawny kid in highschool that ends up going to Cambridge? The Desire employs the now proven 1GHz Snapdragon Processor. This chipset makes the Android 2.1 OS run seamlessly and makes multi-tasking a dream.
Additionally, the implementation of HTC’s latest version of the Sense user interface really shines on both devices.
The power of the Desire and the responsive nature of the screen combine to offer users great mobility across their choice of seven unique homescreens, as well as allowing each user near-full customisation over the widgets.
We particularly enjoyed the Weather widget, which uses the GPS chip in the phone to feed real-time weather data to your homescreen. This data is also manifested through various animations on screen. If it is sunny the screen shines brightly, while if rain is imminent drops will appear and a wiper will run across the screen to clear them away. It’s cheeky, but we love it.
Another interesting and innovative widget is the Friend Stream. This amalgamates all the information from your various social networking exploits and puts them in one convenient place. So you can see what all your friends on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are up to without having to go to each site individually. It’s like having a profile on MyFaceTweet.
The Desire has an emphasis on power, and as a result, it does multimedia better than most other mobile phones on the market. Starting with the 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, this HTC gets it right. The screen has brilliant color saturation, and can pull off some truly deep blacks.
In addition to the big and beautiful screen, the Desire gives users a great web browsing experience. The HTC Desire can load up hefty web pages in just seconds, and has been optimised for use of the Edge connectivity medium, not to mention all the 3G goodness you have time for.
The HTC Legend shares a lot with it’s sibling, the Desire. However, it doesn’t pack a 1GHz snapdragon like the Desire or Nexus One, but rather the 600 MHz processor, similar to that found in Apple’s iPhone 3GS. This means that it can still go 0-60, but not as fast as some of the other smartphones out there.
The HTC Legend’s screen is slightly smaller than the Desire, measuring in a 3.2-inches, and it doesn’t have quiet the wow factor in the resolution department. But with that being said, it's still quite a ample finger playground, and capitalized on its 320x480 AMOLED screen via HTC’s expertly engineered virtual keyboard. The keys are large and offer great corrective typing features, so much so that it is almost like your phone knows what you want to say before you type it.
The Desire and Legend each have an admirable 5.0 megapixel camera that offers competent images and passable videos. Each phone has an LED flash that has been more or less effective when we’ve needed them to be.
The similarities don’t end there. Each phone has an optical trackpad in lieu of the traditional trackball like the one used on Google’s Nexus One.
The HTCs also share the ability to swap out external memory cards, although, the Desire comes with an 8GB card in its box.
Each phone also sports the features that are becoming more standard every day: Accelerometer, GPS, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, etc. Both the Desire and Legend use HTC’s brilliant Android Sense UI, which translates very well onto both platforms.
Each of these phones are a joy to use, that’s no question. However, when it comes to a choice between the two there are only a few points to consider. Seeing as style here is somewhat of a moot point, it really comes down to looks, price, power, and provider plans.
We like the Desire because, c’mon, look at that screen. And there is one heck of a motor under that hood. But if you aren’t dying for the sharpest point of the cutting edge, then you’d surely be happy with HTC’s Legend. Truly, it’s hard to go wrong with these phones, so we say jump on in.
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