HTC Legend review

Here we come to one of the downsides of the HTC Legend - the battery life isn't up to much.

Our take on smartphones is that they should be charged up every day, and the HTC Legend manages to last that long - but only just in most cases.

Put it this way - we tried to push it as hard as we could to see how long the battery would hold out for.

This meant from fully charged, we activated Bluetooth music playback, browsed the internet constantly, downloaded applications, streamed video, downloaded a 164MB file and played with Google Maps repeatedly to see how long the battery could hold out.

We also pushed the screen to full brightness with no time out, activated push email and set Twitter and Facebook to update as often as possible.

The HTC Legend managed to hold out for eight and a half hours before dying completely - which we suppose is average.

What is weird is that if you turn off the background apps - music, Bluetooth and so on - the HTC Legend still managed to drain completely in nine hours.

Under average use, this do-it-all phone will last a day, but it's certainly not industry-leading - the iPhone is probably just a little bit worse, and that's nowhere near a compliment.

But on the other hand, this is a phone that you want to keep playing with - you buy it based on that fact, and we challenge you to find a phone that you'll want to play with this much with a much longer battery life.

Other features

The HTC Legend comes with a few other neat features that we like - the calendar is brilliant for instance.

It synchronises with both your Google and Exchange calendars as soon as you tell it to, and any upcoming meetings will come up as notifications on the phone - with the alarm for this lowering dramatically in volume when you pick up the phone, recognising that you're probably with company and embarrassed.

Quick Office is also included in the package, giving easy access to Word, Excel and Powerpoint files - however, we couldn't see an option to edit these, so we'd imagine hardcore business users might want to download something a little more powerful.

A PDF viewer is also included in the menu as well, with an easy-to-use interface allowing you to quickly zoom in and out.

The HTC Legend might not have the organisational power of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 for instance, but we'd challenge the average worker not to have all his boxes ticked here.

Perhaps a hot-swappable microSD card would be nice (you have to open the battery cover to get to it, and this turns off the phone) but that's about all we can think of.