pwnt.be

I’ll bet the title of this post has a reader or two confused—especially if said reader saw me with the HTC Legend I bought last week. Indeed, for a brief period, I owned one. But things took a turn.

HTC Desire

You see, unfortunately, a mere couple of hours after first booting my newly purchased HTC Legend, I ran into a showstopper. Apparently, the device’s plastic buttons are nowhere near as sturdy as its unibody case. Consequently, the Home button started to wiggle, and even became unresponsive if pressed on its left side.

Truth be told, I briefly thought this behavior was normal. It’s not like the button no longer worked; it was just a bit more loose than one would assume. However, I compared my unit with friends’ and colleagues’, and quickly concluded that theirs felt much more reliable. On the other hand, scouring the interwebs revealed that this was not an isolated issue.

So I contacted Smartphoneshop.be, where I had bought the Legend, and they offered me a replacement. While I was more than satisfied with the device’s actual functionality, I’d simply lost my faith in its build quality and decided to trade it in for the HTC Desire after all.

Let me tell you right here and now: the Desire is just a much better deal than the Legend. I initially went for the Legend because of its design, but not only does it have a tendency to lose its luster pretty quickly, it also comes across as rather bulky. Even though, on paper, the Desire is both heavier and slightly thicker than the Legend, it doesn’t strike one as such. Sure, it’s also more plasticky, and I’m still no fan of its brownish color, but I have to say the unit grew on me virtually instantly.

Of course, part of why it did that is what’s inside. While the Legend certainly didn’t strike me as slow, the Desire’s 1 GHz Snapdragon makes Android fly. Add to that the slightly larger AMOLED panel, which makes it so much easier to use the on-screen keyboard, and you’ve got yourself a smartphone you know you’re going to love.

As I’m sure you’re all aware, both the Legend and the Desire run Android 2.1 (Éclair) with HTC Sense on top. To put it simply, right now, that’s the best Android experience you’re going to get, and it’s awesome. The limitless feature set of Google’s OS covered in HTC’s eye candy provides a solid experience and puts the fun in functionality—yep, I went there.