MWC 2010: HTC Legend Officially Announced

HTC has announced the launch of three new smartphones - two based on Android and one on Windows Mobile 6.5.3 - at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2010 at Barcelona. The new phones announced are the HTC Legend, the Desire and the HD Mini. We will be looking at each of the phones in separate stories. Let's start with the HTC Legend, which is arguably the best looker (and the most talked about as well) amongst the three phones announced.

The Legend is a worthy successor to the HTC Hero, which itself is a very appealing Android handset. One look at the Legend and you will realize that it is not just another phone. The Legend is made of a single block of Aluminum, a thing made fashionable by the Apple Macbook Pro. HTC became the first phone manufacturer to replicate such a thing on a mobile device.

Now, for the features. The HTC Legend comes with a 3.2-inch capacitive AMOLED display capable of displaying 320 x 480 pixels. While the resolution might not be "right up there", it is good enough. The imaging part is taken care of a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. Under the hood, there is a zippy 600 MHz processor partnering with 384MB of RAM. The internal ROM stands at 521Mb and is expandable using microSD cards upto 32GB. Connectivity options include all the expected options- Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. The 1300Mah batter should be good enough to power the Legend for a reasonable amount of time. This, however, is a step down from the HTC Hero, which had a larger battery. The Legend will also use HTC's SENSE UI atop Android 2.1.

On the software scheme of things, the Legend will be Android 2.1 laden and will add new features and UI options. For example, there is a "helicopter view" using which the user ca pinch the screen and choose which of the 5 homescreen options you would like to select from. There is also something known as the FriendStream that aggregates updates from your friends and contacts from various social networks and displays them intuitively. The Legend is expected to be announced in Europe by late March and will be eventually rolled out to the rest of the globe by April.