HTC Legend

We haven't had a chance to fully test this product yet, but we've assembled this helpful overview of relevant information on it.

The HTC Legend features a stunning AMOLED touch-screen display, sculpted alloy body, and a 5 megapixel camera.

The HTC Legend is the latest addition to the company’s lineup of Android devices. It launches on Vodafone and 3 mobile, allows users to create and define their own unique mobile experience through HTC’s user interface, HTC Sense. The ever ubiquitous social networking features on this phone are present as well, including social media integration with Facebook, HTC Peep for twittering and Friend Stream. The HTC Legend has a unique style and design as well.

Features List:

-3.2 inch touchscreen
-600 MHz CPU processing speed
-microSD memory card
-5 mp digital camera
-Facebook integration

Press Release:

HTC Unveils The HTC Legend™ On Vodafone And 3 Mobile

Sydney, Australia – 26 May, 2010 – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, today introduced the latest addition to its growing smartphone range – the HTC Legend™. The HTC Legend™ will be available from 3rd June exclusively on Vodafone and 3 mobile.

“HTC Legend™ is the newest addition to our fast-growing Android family of devices that brings a fresh, innovative and unmatched level of personalisation for our users,” said Anthony Petts, Sales and Marketing Director ANZ, HTC Corporation. “This device, launching on Vodafone and 3 mobile, allows users to create and define their own unique mobile experience through HTC’s user interface, HTC Sense. The HTC Legend™ also includes social media integration with Facebook™, HTC Peep for twittering and Friend Stream.”

“Exclusively on Vodafone and 3 we will be bringing customers the HTC Legend at a great price point, with all the benefits of our leading caps plans including unlimited free talk Vodafone to Vodafone or 3 to 3 within Australia. It’s a highly anticipated mobile, combining great aesthetics with the evolutionary Android OS. It’s a mobile we think our customers will love,” said Ross Parker, General Manager Devices and Pricing, Vodafone Hutchison Australia.

HTC Legend™

Built around a newly enhanced HTC Sense, the HTC Legend™ boasts a unique design with a smooth, continuous surface, machined from a single aluminum block into a seamless compact frame. To complement its looks, the HTC Legend™ includes a stunning 3.2 inch, AMOLED HVGA display, and an optical joystick that is surrounded by a narrow button to make phone navigation even easier.

Key Features

• Automatically lowers the ringer volume as soon as the phone is picked up

• Mutes the ringer when the phone is flipped face down

• Backs up certain data and settings to the microSD card automatically, such as SMS/MMS messages, bookmarks, and Wi-Fi passwords

• 3.5 mm stereo audio jack

• Social media integration including Facebook™, HTC Peep for twittering and Friend Stream

• News widget that combines news feeds into a single easy accessible place

• Photo sharing on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter

• Video sharing on YouTube™

• Enhanced support for Exchange security features such as password protection and remote data wipe

• High fidelity experience with Adobe® Flash® support brings to life the vast video and gaming content of the Internet

HTC SENSE

HTC Sense is a user experience focused on putting people at the centre by making phones work in a more simple and natural way. This experience revolves around three fundamental principles that were developed by observing and listening to how people live and communicate. These core tenets of Make It Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected continue to be the key to the new HTC Sense experience.

The new HTC Sense experience continues to focus on improving your interactions with your most important people. This begins with a new HTC application and widget called Friend Stream that seamlessly aggregates all of your social communication including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into one organised flow of updates. This simple aggregation makes it easier than ever to focus on what friends are doing as well as to view the images and links that they share. In addition to Friend Stream, people can be organised into specific social circles, such as groups of friends, colleagues or any other way that makes sense.

The new HTC Sense experience also introduces broad improvements to applications including the browser, email client and others. In addition, the new version of HTC Sense includes a new newsreader application and widget, as well as a new seven-screen ‘Leap’ thumbnail view for quick and easy access to specific screens.

Availability and Pricing

HTC Legend ™ will be available for $0 upfront on the $49 cap plan, or can be purchased outright for a RRP of $599. It will be available from Vodafone stores and dealers from 3rd June and launch dates to follow soon on 3 mobile.

Digital Trends’ Cell Phone Buying Tips:

Apps

If a building is only as good as its foundation, then a smartphone is only as good as its app store. Even as manufacturers continue to stack their handsets with YouTube support, instant messaging, and other essentials right out of the box, the features just don’t add up to the amount of capability a phone can take on in the hands of the right developers: You name it, a good smartphone can do it.

The app store you buy into will have a longstanding effect on the way you use your phone – perhaps more than any other feature. But it’s tough to get a feel for every smartphone app store when you don’t get to push a cart down the aisles until you have a carrier contract in your filing cabinet and there’s no turning back.

Apple’s App Store has been leading the market in sheer numbers of apps since the original iPhone was release. Android is catching up in total numbers and offers a higher ratio of free apps in the Android Market than Apple does. Nokia’s Ovi Store, RIM’s BlackBerry App World and Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace all offer quality apps but currently lag far behind Apple and Android.

Different form factors

Even after choosing between a smartphone or feature phone, you have a lot of choices to make to decide what your phone will actually look like.

A full touch layout like the iPhone has become popular for smartphones, but you’ll usually forgo a hard keyboard as a result. Some smartphones like the Droid 2 or the BlackBerry Torch offer a slide-out keyboard as a compromise, but get thicker as a result, too. Many smartphones also dupe the popular BlackBerry design: small screen on top, small keyboard below.

In feature phones, the flip or “clamshell” form factor has proven especially popular because of its small size and the fact that it protects the screen and keys when closed. Phones with both the screen and keypad on a fixed rectangular slab are typically called “candybar” phones. As with smartphones, you’ll many feature phones with dedicated QWERTY keyboards, which can be handy for frequent text messagers.

Whichever you decide to go with, make sure to physically handle the phone at a kiosk or store prior to buying. Pictures can often drastically misrepresent the size of phones.

Notable Features

The list of features to look for in a phone could fill an anthology, so we’ll run down some of the most important ones.

Cameras appear on nearly every phone these days. Although a quality camera can be great for quick snapshots, few phone cameras are ready to replace a trusty point-and-shoot. The few with variable focus far outperform fixed-focus cameras, which you’ll find on the majority.

When considering a display, pay attention to size and brightness, which will both come in handy when trying to read it in difficult conditions like outdoors in the sun. LCD displays are still the most common, but OLED displays have been cropping up lately as well. They use slightly less power and produce extremely vibrant color, but suffer from poor outdoor visibility.

Battery life often gets buried at the end of buyers’ wishlists, only to lead to disappointment when they realize they can barely go a whole day without recharging. Be particularly careful with smartphones, which can get particularly thirsty.

If you plan to use your phone for playing music or watching video, be sure to check for internal and external storage. If the phone has a microSD slot you should be able to add up to 32GB of additional storage.

Choosing a carrier

Because most U.S. cell phone carriers heavily subsidize phone purchases in exchange for two-year contracts, and lock the phones to their networks, your choice of cell carrier will have more impact on which type of phone you end up with than any other factor. If you already have carrier and feel satisfied with it, the choice is easy. If not, you’ll need to choose one.

AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon dominate the cell phone market in the States. Speaking in very general terms, AT&T has a reputation for having the hottest phones but somewhat flaky service due to its overloaded towers, Verizon has the best reception but expensive rates, T-Mobile and Sprint offer some of the most affordable plans but have  more limited phone selection.

Prepaid carriers like Cricket, Tracfone, and MetroPCS often appear to offer excellent deals, but caveats like poor customer service, limited phone selection and inferior coverage have to be taken into account.