HTC Legend hands-on (photos)

The HTC Legend is a refinement of the GSM HTC Hero. The smartphone was designed by One & Co. and features a softer design with smoother edges and curves. It's also has an aluminum unibody construction, which creates a seamless design. The Legend is sleek, sexy, and solid.

Though the display size and resolution are the same as on the Hero, the Legend gets upgraded to an AMOLED touch screen, and it's quite lovely--vibrant and sharp.

To keep with the seamless design created by the unibody construction, HTC replaced the trackball with an optical joystick. We have to admit we were a little skeptical of it due to its small size, but it actually was quite functional. We're not going to pass final judgment on it, however, until we've used the device for more than 10 minutes.

The love-it-or-hate-it chin is back on the HTC Legend. We actually didn't mind it so much this time. Perhaps it's grown on us, but we thought it was subtle enough to not take away from the phone's attractiveness, and it did give the device a distinctive look.

The new version of HTC Sense released at MWC adds the capability to organize your contacts by groups. You can have one for work, friends, family--whatever you please. The UI looks good and it's simple enough to add and remove contacts from a group.

Another new aspect of HTC Sense is the Friend Stream. The widget provides a single place for all your social-networking needs, where you can see what everyone's doing on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr in one single place. Unlike Motoblur, it's not server based, and it looks a lot less cluttered.

This could possibly be our favorite new feature of HTC Sense. Called Leap, you can pinch the home screen and it will then bring up all of your home screen panels, allowing you to easily "leap" to the screen you want. It's simple and it works.

The Web browser is pretty much the same but the HTC Legend is Adobe Flash 10.1 ready.

The top of the phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack and a power button.

The Legend doesn't have a typical battery door. You remove it from the bottom and than you can open a latch that gives you access to your SIM card, microSD card, and the battery. The latter simply slides out when the latch is open so don't have to pry it out.

A side view of battery latch.

The Legend features a 5-megapixel camera with flash, auto-focus, widescreen photo capture, and geotagging.