Wow! Just, wow! That was pretty much the crux of our first impressions of HTC's latest Android-based smartphone, the Legend. With a chassis carved from a single piece of aluminium, with a beautiful sandblasted finish, this is one stunning looking device. As Gordon rightly pointed out at the World Mobile Congress, the Legend looks and feels somewhere between the first generation iPhone and the new unibody aluminium Macbooks, and we mean that in every possible good way.
However, there are a few immediate problems. First, contrary to what you might expect, matt aluminium like this still scratches fairly easily (though less so than plastic) and over time can be polished to a shine on exposed edges and corners. As such we'd be inclined to keep the Legend in some sort of case – I'm a big fan of the leather slip, like this one I use with my iPhone – that protects the phone when in transit but doesn't hide its design or inhibit its functionality when in use. However, due to the Legend's jutting jaw profile such cases can't be used. Aesthetically, we don't mind it and we appreciate it's a design feature that harks back to the first Android phone, the G1, and this phone's direct predecessor, the HTC Hero, but on a practical level we think it's something that needs to go.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mobile-phones/review/2010/03/10/HTC-Legend/p1
