Tags: Android, footprints, friendstream, Gadgets, HTC, HTC Legend, HTC Sense, leap[ × ]

HTC, the manufacturer that brought us the first Android device, aims to dazzle us once again with one very sexy device — The Legend.

I’ve been test driving the Legend for a few weeks and the experience so far has been sweet.

Look At That Body!

The Legend sports a solid aluminum unibody design, a style similar to the very sexy unibody MacBook pro.  Media, apps & widgets look beautiful on the 3.2” HVGA AMOLTED display with 7 revolving home screens.

The soft, smooth and boxy casing with a slight curvature (flipped) at the bottom, feels great to hold.  The screen on the Legend is a tad smaller than the Nexus One which has a longer body and a sort of rounded feel on the edges.

The solid piece of aluminum covers the entire front & back and  doesn’t have the usual large battery slot accessed by removing the backing of the phone.  Instead the battery, MicroSD and SIM sit under a small rubber slot which provides a rubber groove on the backing offering a struggle-free removal.  Nice touch.  The camera, located on the back of the device (no front facing camera) is protected by the same soft rubber used to support the battery at the base of the device.

Power & Storage
The Legend has a Qualcomm 600 Mhz processor, 512 MB of ROM and 384 MB of RAM.  It supports MicroSD (SD 2.0 compatible) up to 32 GB.  Moving through apps is crazy snappy, no lags that I’ve experienced.

Optical Joystick :
Onscreen navigation can be achieved with the optical joystick / track ball which has a flat surface unlike the rolling trackball found on the Nexus One.  I’ve never been a fan of the rolling trackball, accidentally selecting an option (using the rolling trackball) is a common problem,  for me anyways.  Upon putting it to the test, the newly designed optical joystick was a great deal more accurate.

Taking Pics: Camera
Moving on to the Legend’s camera which in my humble opinion is pretty darn sweet.  The cam shoots up to 5 megapixels and has auto focus, LCD flash and a powerful zoom.  Prior to taking a shot you’re able to adjust image properties & effects such as contrast, saturation, sharpness, grayscale, sepia, negative and exposure.  Additional tweaking within the settings;  ISO, white balance, quality, geo-tags, self-timer, grid, shutter sound, metering mode and flickr adjustments.

Shooting Video: Camcorder
Filming will bring up some additional video options not seen while using the still cam; record with or without audio, limit the length of a clip, encode in MPEG4 / h.263 and resolution variations: VGA (640×480) CIF (352×288) QVGA (320×240).  Adjusting things such as brightness, contrast, colour and zoom are all possible but need to be done prior to shooting. Records in: .3gp

Here’s an example of video I shot using “out of the box” settings.

HTC SENSE
The Legend’s UI HTC Sense (built on Android OS) has some excellent features & benefits.

A few highlights I thought were worthy of noting…

At first glance I really liked the curved dock located at the bottom of the screen.  Within this easy-to-see dock you can easily ‘add items to the home screen’ (widgets, apps, shortcuts, folders), ‘make a call’ or ‘view all apps’.  For you tactile keyboard fans they’ve included a keyboard with vibration feedback and it works in both portrait and landscape modes.  Coming from a Nexus One and iPhone 3Gs, I found the keyboard a bit wee. The buttons are very slender (in portrait mode) even for the smallest of hands, this is the sacrifice of having a smaller device in your pocket.

Web Browser:
Not the snappiest browser I’ve ever used but it does support multi touch, bookmarks and the ability to run multiple windows.

Oh and…  it supports flash ! Yes, it allows you to watch flash videos & animations  however it could use some work.  It’s a bit choppy at times but it’s honestly hard to complain about it considering my other devices don’t support it.  Who’s to know who’s to blame about the erratic behaviour of flash.  This may not be HTC’s problem.  Could be Adobe’s problem.

YouTube
In short, media looks fantastic on the AMOLTED screen.  The native YouTube app is very snappy playing vids smoothly.

Scenes
There’s a new menu option called ‘Scenes’ which gives users a themed experience to the UI with theme-specific wallpapers and widgets. As an example, one of the Scene options titled “Social” fills up your home screens with social widgets; mail, Friend Stream and contact favourites.  Your additional scenery options; HTC, social, work, play, travel, clean slate, default and custom.

Leap: Mobile Expose?
Pinching ( pinch to zoom ) on a home screen  will achieve an experience similar to hitting the hot key in OSX called Leap.  The expose-like view of your home screens is nothing short of awesome.

Friend Stream
HTC has integrated social networking on the Legend with its new build in Friend Stream widget.  From your home screen you’re able to post updates while receiving broadcasts from your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.  This large social hub widget with its slightly transparent background looks gorgeous on the screen.  Touching “selecting” a status update will bring you to the full screen app, like most social clients, its options include ; all updates, Status updates, photos and links.   Commenting,  Liking and accessing your @’s, DMs, Favourites and viewing contacts from Twitter can all be achieved with Friend Stream.  Overall a pretty cool app to ship with a mobile device.

Visual Location Journal
HTC FootPrints assists you in creating a journal of an event or anything you’d like to document or remember.  Journals can be organized by pre-set event-types.  This app has a nice UI and with its attachment of location data on Google maps it could be very useful for documenting the address of a product you’ve found, stores, restaurants or whatever you might want a pic+address of.

Improving on Android Music Players
The UI of the native music player has uber-sexy animated song turns when your browsing to a new song.  Sharing a song via bluetooth and viewing detailed track information can both be accessed from the song menu.  And of course widgets for this app can be added so you’ll be able to access music from your home screen.

Peeps, Friends and Home Boyz
People ( address book ) has social integration so you’ll conveniently be able to view, organize and interact with your friends a few different ways.  You’re able to browse your friend’s profiles on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter or engage their posts ( like, comment, reply ) all within the contacts. You can additionally add a company directory (exchange activesync account).  Engagement of your social networks is possible by selecting a contact.  Facebook fans can view a friends’ wall, comment and like. Same deal with Twitter and Flickr.  I’m a fan of the network division rather than lumping everyone together.  Pretty neat.

Peep
Twitter fans can use the always-on Twitter app Peep to connect with tweeple from the home screen.  Two Twitter widgets are available.

Picture Gallery
The image & video albums are quite pretty and very social.   After feeding the app your log-in details for Facebook and Flickr, you’ll be able to view your friends albums sorted by contacts, similar to a mobile address book contact list.  Photos can of course also be shared or set as contact icons, wallpaper, lock screen, favourite or save as a  footprint (journal). Video supported formats: Playback: .3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .wmv

Text Selection:
Selecting / highlighting a piece of text provides a handy menu of options;  copy to clip board, share and search.  When sharing text, it shortens the url prior to allowing you to send it to Friend Stream, Mail, Messages or additional social apps you have installed.
The truly fantastic search option, gives users the ability to translate their text selection into 23 different languages but keep in mind the word count length of your selection will drastically increase the time it takes to process the translation.  From the translation screen the option to search on Wikipedia and Google’s dictionary is conveniently possible.

Verdict:
I love this phone.  The design is sweet and the HTC Sense’s UI seems to be more intuitive for Android newbies.  After handing the phone to friend who’s a hardcore iPhone fanboy (Android virgin), he easily grasped the UI — not the case with past Android devices I’ve passed to noobs.

I’ll be the first to admit that trading in my iPhone for an Android was inconceivable to me prior to getting my hands on the Nexus One and Legend.  While the Android Market has a ways to go in the app department (I want the hot titles) before I’d ever do that, the open nature of the Android OS and the devices themselves are moving closer and closer to winning over smartphone fans.  The Legend is one super sexy gadget if you’re in the market for an Android.  The ability to view flash.. priceless.

Specs:

I’ll be following this post with a head to head of Nexus One v Legend.



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