HTC Legend review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
HTC Legend price سعر اتش تي سي ليجند
HTC Legend price سعر اتش تي سي ليجند
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It took a little Magic and a Dream but Android eventually got a Hero to champion the OS. Now, the HTC Legend comes in an aluminum suit of armor to join the ranks of the Android army. So, is this knight in shining armor set to be the vanguard of the explosive growth of Android?
The predecessor of the HTC Legend, the Hero, pioneered Sense UI and this latest gadget follows suit, but brings some innovation of its own.
The HTC Legend borrows a page from high-end laptop design – the aluminum unibody. The unibody design was touted as a game-changing breakthrough when it hit the laptop market. A lot of that was marketing hype, but the fact is that unibody metal designs still have a distinct quality feel to them.
Before we jump into any details, we’ll go over the key aspects of the HTC Legend and what we found lacking.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
Key features
- Aluminum unibody design
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- 3G with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps
- Android OS v2.1 with latest Sense UI
- 3.2″ capacitive AMOLED touchscreen of HVGA resolution
- Qualcomm MSM 7227 600 MHz CPU, 384 MB RAM
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and VGA@30fps video recording
- Web browser comes with Flash support
- Multi-touch zooming in gallery and web browser
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and GPS receiver
- Digital compass for automatic navigation of maps
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and turn-to-mute
- Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP); File transfer over Bluetooth
- Standard microUSB port for charging and data
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack
- FM Radio with RDS
- microSD card slot with support for up to 32GB cards (2GB one included)
- Tethering support right out-of-the-box
- Social networking integration with Facebook and Twitter
- Direct access to the official Android application repository
Main disadvantages
- No video-call camera (or videocalling whatsoever)
- No dedicated shutter key or lens cover
- No TV-out port
- No voice dialing
- No DivX or XviD video support out of the box
- Dodgy flash video support
The aluminum body isn’t the only hardware upgrade the Legend got over the Hero, the TFT display technology has been switched in favor of AMOLED and that’s not all. Some of the other specs have alos received a refresh.
Despite trading plastic for metal, the Legend is actually slimmer around the waist than the Hero – it’s just 11.5mm thick and it’s a pinch lighter too. Something that will evoke either a positive or negative response depending on the person is the move to an optical trackpad instead of the tried and true trackball.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
HTC Sense reloaded
HTC Hero pioneered the Sense UI on to the Android handsets and won a huge fan base. HTC Tattoo was the next Sense-featuring device, but the UI just didn’t feel natural on the QVGA screen.
HTC Legend is the successor of the Hero slightly improving the CPU and RAM specs. It packs the latest Android v2.1 taking full advantage of its performance boost and full color capabilities. As result of that the pre-loaded Sense UI is even more pretty, fast and fluid. As we speak, the HTC Hero is about to get an update to ver. 2.1 too – it should be available in the beginning of April.
The main differences between this version of the Sense UI and the one back in the Hero are the new context icons, a few new wallpapers and the unified Widget section. Whether you are using the People, Mail, Music or Gallery Tabs, the scrollable icons at the bottom will please you with new color skins. We welcomed this change, since the old ones looked boring set on the otherwise graphically lively and colorful UI.
The dream phonebook is here
HTC Legend features the same powerful phonebook we first saw into Hero. It resembles the one from the HTC TouchFLO but also extend its functionality a lot.
Opening a contact’s details presents you with the basic info for the contact – name and photo, numbers, emails and such. What you’d notice though is that there are another five tabs at the bottom and you’re just viewing the first tab.
Good telephony
Voice quality in calls is good and the volume is excellent. Reception is quite good as well.
The dialer features a keypad, call log shortcut and a list of contacts beneath (you can hide the keypad). Smart Dialing is also available.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
Rich messaging department
The HTC Legend can handle all common types of messages – SMS, MMS and email. Google Talk is in charge of instant messaging. Email support is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.
The on-screen full QWERTY keyboard in the HTC Legend works in both portrait and landscape modes. The individual button size is decent and sensitivity just fine and we registered no problems.
HTC and Gmail are your mail clients
Gmail is one thing that you can’t expect to have changed much compared to other Android handsets. There are a few HTC add-ons, but nothing major. Batch operations, which debuted on the HTC Magic, allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted.
Image gallery has pinch zooming
The gallery has a the usual main menu list-with-thumbnail structure. The Albums app automatically locates images and videos, no matter where they are stored. Images and videos stored in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder – quite effective file management.
Unfortunately, the gallery undertakes reindexing of the content each time you open it and it does so even when you open a file for an instant and then get back to the thumbnail view. And that’s a bugger as when cards are full of content, it’s quite slow to complete.
Right next to the folder’s name is a number indicating the count of images stored. Each sub-album has a thumbnail of the latest image. The contextual menu of the main Album view has only one shortcut to the settings menu. There is also a camera shortcut, but it’s only available once you start browsing any of the sub-folders.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
Good video player, but no DivX/XviD
Video files can be accessed only from the Albums’ subfolder as there is no separate icon for the video player in the main menu. The video files can also be viewed as a grid or filmstrip and can be shared via Gmail, HTC mail, Messages or YouTube.
Music player is all the same
As with the rest of the multimedia department, the music player is also the same as in the Legend.
The standard music library view is the Artists section, but you can easily switch to one of the other six tabs beneath, which are for Albums, All Songs, Playlists, Genres, Composers and Purchased.
FM radio
The HTC Legend is also equipped with an FM radio, which has a pretty simple interface. It automatically scans the area for the available stations and allows you to mark some of them as favorite for easier scrolling between them. It also supports RDS and allows playback through the loudspeaker.
Great audio quality
The HTC Legend has a slightly better audio output than that of its predecessor, the HTC Hero. The noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk may have lost some ground but are still excellent, while the rest of the readings (which weren’t quite as impressive on the Hero) have improved greatly.
Frequency response is now spot on for the entire range and distortions have been kept well under control. All in all – a very good overall performance.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
Uninspiring 5 megapixel snapper
HTC Legend relies on a 5 megapixel camera module with a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1936 pixels and a LED flash for its photography needs. This is becoming pretty much the norm for recent upper mid-range and high-end Android handsets so the HTC seems to be on level ground with its competitors.
However thanks to running Android 2.1 the Legend also has a camera interface that is similar to some of its competitors outside the Google OS world. There are a number of customizable settings ranging from ISO speed to aspect ratio and auto focus and even if that makes the Omnia HD owners giggle it’s a nice improvement for the Android crew.
We are yet to see modern-day features such as face, smile and blink detection, for example, but the gap is closing.
VGA video
HTC Legend manages to record VGA videos at 30 fps, which is quite good for an Android handset. There are only a couple of devices that do better than that (the HTC Desire and the Google Nexus One) but even they only go as high as D1 and that is just 12.5 percent better).
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
The interface of the camcorder is similar to the one on the still camera and by usual Android standards there are tons of customizable options with this one. You can set the video resolution, encoding type and recording limit.
Connectivity options are plenty
The HTC Legend offers a virtually identical set of connectivity options as its predecessor, the HTC Hero. However even now, nine months later, this seems like a pretty decent package to have on your phone.
You have quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE securing worldwide roaming capabilities and dual-band (900/2100 MHz) 3G with HSPA. The HSDPA is quoted at 7.2Mbps and the HSUPA can reach up to 2Mbps.
We then move on to local connectivity – the Legend offers USB v2.0 connectivity via a microUSB port, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP support and Wi-Fi. Now that they’ve enabled Bluetooth transfers, there is very little more to ask for.
Internet tethering is also available via the microUSB port and it’s as easy as it gets to activate. Just select tethering when the handset prompts you to select how to connect to your computer and you are good to go. HTC have also thought of people without a data plan and allow you to explicitly forbid the handset to access mobile network internet.
The great web browser even packs Flash
The great web browsing skills have been an incoherent part of the Android platform since day one. Now that we are to version 2.1 things are even sweeter with the intuitive user interface even more polished and the functionality reaching new heights.
The user interface is pretty much nonexistent at first sight. With pinch-zooming enabled you don’t even need the +/- zoom buttons that we have seen on most other Android handsets.
The address bar is locked at the top of the page so you can scroll down and hide that too. However you don’t need to scroll to the top every time you want to tap a new address – just press the menu button and invoke it anywhere on the page.
The Legend browser also supports double tap zooming and text reflow, which make it extremely easy to read even longer texts on the phone display. Without text reflow you will either have to zoom out until the text fits (but then it’s too small to read comfortably) or scroll sideways to read each line.
The minimalist UI is still quite powerful – hit the menu key and six keys pop up. You can open a new tab, switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, open bookmarks. The final button reveals even more options (text copying, find on page, etc.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
Organizer well prepared, Office document reader preinstalled
The HTC Legend comes with the usual for Sense UI Android handsets set of organizing apps. Much like the Motorola BACKFLIP, which we reviewed last week, it also has a preinstalled document viewer, which handles office files just fine.
Again we are talking about the Quickoffice app, which has support for viewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, including the Office 2007 versions.
For editing, you will need to get the paid app though. There is also a PDF viewer app that handles the PDF files.
GPS navigation lacks voice-guidance
The HTC Legend comes with a built-in GPS receiver. It was able to achieve satellite lock in just over two minutes without the A-GPS assistance which isn’t too bad at all.
Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and of course makes an appearance on the Legend as well. Its voice-guided navigation version, the Google Maps Navigation is available only in the US, but the rest of the world is in no luck here.
HTC Legend price اتش تي سي ليجند
Android Market knows no slowdown
HTC Legend comes with a common HVGA display and runs Android 2.1 so the Android Market has quite a lot of stuff to offer for it. With the number of applications growing by the hour and no low-res restrictions, the choice of apps is quite impressive.
The structure of the Android Market is quite simple – featured apps on top and above them, three sections (Applications, Games and Downloads). There is also a shortcut up there for initiating a search.
