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The initial temptation is to compare the HTC Legend with the HTC Desire, after all, they were announced side-by-side at Mobile World Congress a month back and they share a very similar set of features. However, this would be terribly unfair, as the Desire occupies a different space in HTC’s range and would undoubtedly come out on top in terms of on-paper performance.

No, when looking at the Legend, the thing to do is to compare it with the HTC Hero, the phone which it’s set to replace. The Hero is one of the best Android powered smartphones available, making it a tough act to follow, so does the Legend live up to its not-so-modest name?

Becoming a Legend.

Power.

The Hero used a 528MHz Qualcomm processor and had 512MB ROM and 288MB of RAM to help it along its way, but the Legend hits the scene with a speedier 600MHz Qualcomm chip, the same 512MB ROM but 384MB RAM onboard. When you remember that the HTC Desire uses Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon chipset, you’ll begin to see why it wouldn’t have been a straight fight!

The Legend also packs the latest v2.1 build of Google’s Android operating system, bringing with it Microsoft Exchange support, Bluetooth v2.1, those cool live wallpapers seen first on the Google Nexus One, plus a variety of performance tweaks too.

Style.

This is one area where the Legend is tough to beat, as this is one good-looking phone! The body is made from one piece of aluminium, with the addition of rubber/plastic endplates and a gorgeous 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen. It may have the same 320×480 pixel resolution as the Hero, but the Legend’s screen has been upgraded to become an AMOLED item. This returns stunning performance with bright colours, sharp detail and deep blacks.

The old trackball seen on the Hero and the Nexus One has been replaced with the same optical trackpad as on the Desire, plus there are four hardware buttons below the screen for Home, Menu, Back and Search control. On the left side is the volume rocker and on the top, the on/off/sleep key, but other than that, nothing spoils the sleek finish of the Legend.

HTC’s Sense plays a big part in the Legend’s visual impact, as the homescreens pop out at you as soon as you wake the phone up from sleeping, plus in addition to being considerable eye-candy, Sense is very practical too. This latest version adds Friend Stream, a program which collects all your social networking updates into one handy stream, and Leap, which offers an expanded overview of all your homescreens, plus all the varied widgets and homescreen additions found on previous versions.

What Else Can it Do?

• Connectivity. This is a top-end smartphone, so we have 3G with 7.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA, along with Wi-Fi, A2DP Bluetooth v2.1 and Assisted GPS.  The Legend uses the newly approved universal microUSB connection for charging and there is a 3.5mm headphone port on the top edge.
• Widgets. HTC have given a generous helping of standard widgets including an alternative analogue clock, a photo album, a picture frame, bookmarks for quick browser access to your favourite websites, a Facebook and Twitter widget, an RSS news widget, HTC’s own Footprints app, a handy calendar and many more.
• Scenes. These allow further customisation of your homescreens, allowing you to create different homescreen setups depending on what you’re doing i.e. a work-specific Scene may have multiple clocks, a comprehensive calendar and email close to hand, all laid over the least intrusive wallpaper, while a weekend Scene will have a small calender, Friend Stream, live wallpaper and your music player.
• Web Browser. The fast browser is really fantastic! The WebKit-based program handles Flash video as standard, with the 10.1 update coming soon too, plus speed-dial style bookmarks and details on your most visited sites. Also take a look at the text reflow, which changes the formatting of text when you zoom in to match the screen orientation, so you have to do the minimum of scrolling to read the screen.
• Social Networking. Aside from the aforementioned Friend Stream, you have widgets for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Google-related networks.
• Messaging. SMS and MMS messages are present and correct, plus Microsoft Exchange support, Gmail and most other webmail accounts too.
• Camera. This is a 5megapixel camera with its lens found top-centre on the rear of the phone, next to an LED flash. Both autofocus and geo-tagging are supported, along with VGA video shooting.
• Application Store. Where would an operating system be without an app store!  Android users can access the Android Market, where there are many free and pay apps ready for download.
• Multimedia. The standard MP3 player handles your music, the video player is happy with MP4 and AVI videos, plus there is a YouTube application too.
• Memory and Power. Underneath the removable base panel you’ll find access to the battery, SIM card and a microSD card slot.  Anything up to 16GB is accepted by the microSD card port, while the battery is quoted as returning around 560 hours standby and 6 hours talktime in 3G mode.
• Any Other Differences with the Hero? The Legend is lighter at 126 grams and slimmer at a touch over 11mm, plus it has an FM radio.

Any Downsides?

• Multi-touch. The HTC Legend supports multi-touch and uses it in several different areas, including Leap, but it doesn’t work in the mapping software yet.
• The Chin. Love it or hate it, the Legend’s chin may be smaller than the Hero’s, but it’s the one part of the design which will split opinion.

Summary.

The Desire may grab the headlines thanks to its processor and massive screen, but it’s the Legend that we can see being used as an everyday phone by every type of person.  It’s just so customisable that it won’t matter whether you want to use it for business or pleasure, as it can adapt to either in a moment. We loved the Hero, but the Legend’s aluminium body, Android 2.1 and AMOLED screen may just have won over our fickle heart.

There used to be a lot of jokes about the CrackBerry problem, the fact that BlackBerry users became addicted to their mobile phones. It appears that this is a problem for users of other smartphones, too, though. A recent survey indicates that iPhone users have a likelihood of becoming dependent upon their devices. In fact, three out of four of them admit to sleeping with their phones in their beds.

The survey took a look at the activities of 200 students who owned iPhones. The majority of these students were relatively new to iPhone use, having had their iPhone for less than one full year. Despite the fact that they hadn’t had their phones for very long, many admitted that they were at least moderately addicted to the device. Ten percent said that they were totally addicted and another 34% ranked their addiction as a level four out of five. Users who didn’t admit to being addicted frequently said that they could see becoming addicted as a problem that could happen to them in the future.

So what is it that makes the iPhone so addictive? Part of the cause is the fact that it’s so easy to replace other devices with the iPhone. Nearly 90% of the users surveyed used their iPhone to replace their alarms and almost that many used it to replace their watches. Access to the Internet also makes this phone addictive; in fact, 15% of users said that the device itself was giving them an addiction to media. Perhaps most importantly is the fact that many iPhone users consider the phone to be an extension of themselves, a part of their social lives and therefore more special than other consumer electronics. Regardless of what they used their iPhones for, close to half of them felt like losing it would be a tragedy.

You are probably familiar with the importance of clearing out the cache and cookies on your home computer. Doing so can speed up and improve the performance of your computer. It’s also a good security feature. But did you know that this is something that you should be doing manually on your phone as well?

If you have an LG Pop and your carrier is O2 then clearing out both the cache and the cookies will be really easy. Here’s what you need to do:

• Go to Menu.
• Select Utilities.
• Select O2 Home.
• Select Settings.
• Choose either “cache” or “cookies”.
• Select “clear”. (It will either say “clear cache” or “clear cookies” depending on which button you selected in the previous step.
• Confirm that “yes” this is what you want to do.
• Repeat the steps to clear the other selection (either cache or cookies, whichever one you haven’t done yet).

Everything’s all clear now and your phone should work faster than before.

The Motorola Droid doesn’t come with a built in speed dial feature. This frustrates a lot of people who are used to mobile phones that allow them to easily speed dial the contacts that they call most frequently. You don’t have to remain frustrated, though. There’s a way to work around this issue and to effectively make it possible to speed dial contacts from your Motorola Droid.

Here’s how to do it:

• Go to the home screen of your Motorola Droid.
• Press down on the home screen and hold.
• A menu will pop up. Select the option that reads “shortcuts”.
• From the new menu, select the option to “direct dial”.
• You will now be able to choose the contact that you wish to set up a direct dial button for. Select from among your existing contacts.
• The contact that you have chosen will now show up as a shortcut on your phone. When you want to call this person, you simply go to the shortcut. Although this isn’t a true speed dial function, it works effectively for the same purpose.

Note, if you have a significant number of contacts that you call frequently then you might not want to put direct dial shortcuts for all of them on to your home screen. In this case, a better option is to go in and star all of the contacts that you want to be able to speed dial. Then you can create a shortcut for the starred folder. When you open this shortcut, just the starred contacts will appear and you can choose the one you want to call. Again, this is not true speed dial but it’s a good shortcut for placing quick calls.

Some more news concerning another entry into Nokia’s Cseries range of mobile phones has broken, this time based around the C6. An image appearing on Tom’s Guide indicates the C6 will be a 5800-style touchscreen candybar with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Following Nokia’s explanation of their new naming system, this places the C6 one step above the C5 and part of their core range. Similarities to the N97 Mini are obvious, but as this is not an Nseries phone, we can expect a smaller processor and less memory.

This is backed up by information from Tom’s source, who suggests the C6 will have 256MB of internal memory, although a microSD card slot is likely to be waiting in the wings to increase this. No other information on the C6 was forthcoming, but they expect the phone to make an appearance during summer this year.

This isn’t the first time a Nokia C6 has hit the news, as the name has been used before, when Nokia chose the designation for a 2110 clone back in 1997, and more recently when it was linked to a QWERTY-equipped phone along the same lines as the E72 and oddly, the Palm Centro, which was also linked with the codename Mystic. Oh, what a tangled web the C6 leaves behind it!

We started out with blurry, then followed it with less blurry but no more explanatory and now we reach the next stage, clear enough and snapped from just about every conceivable angle, but still with no new facts. The BlackBerry Slider is nothing but coy!

Facts, as we said, are still absent, but there is plenty of speculation. Everyone seems to be coming around to this being a hybrid of the Bold and the Storm, potentially named the 9700a. The camera lens in the new pictures doesn’t reveal any of its secrets, but BBLeaks.com suggest that it could be a 5megapixel item using liquid lens technology.

A liquid lens has the ability to change shape and focal length quickly, without the need for extra space, making them perfect for use in mobile phones. Another benefit of the liquid lens’ speed is to stabilise an image. This would be one of the first on the market and it’s perhaps surprising that BlackBerry – hardly known for camera innovation – is leading the pack.

So, these images complete our picture of the Slider, and now it would be nice to have some actual, concrete information to go along with it!