Besides the introduction of the HTC HD mini – HTC made 2 other smartphone announcements today. 2 new Android devices:  The HTC Desire (Which was formerly known as the HTC Bravo) and the HTC Legend. Both phones are pretty interesting in it’s own way:

HTC Legend

The HTC Legend is a Phone which strongly reminds of the HTC Hero. It just looks smoother than the HTC Hero. When we look at the features of the HTC Legend we see some nice features that are unique in the HTC Legend. It’s frame is built from 1 single piece of aluminum and it’s got a 3.2″ AMOLED Display. An other feature is that it’s traditional trackball is replaced by an optical trackball. The 5 Megapixel Autofocus camera has a LED-Flashlight (FINALLY A GOOD CAMERA!!). It’s got a 600 MHz processor, ROM-memory of 512 MB and RAM-memory of  384 MB. This all is powered by a non-spectacular battery of 1300 mAh.

Personally I think the optical trackball is a nice feature if it works like the way it should work. Regular Trackballs tend to get stuck due to dust or other little things blocking the trackball. An optical trackball is a great solution for this.

HTC Desire

The other Android phone announced by HTC is the HTC Desire.

The HTC Desire is pretty much the same like the Google Nexus One, but has more hardware buttons. Just like the HTC Legend the Desire has the regular trackball replaced by an optical trackball.  The buttons “Home, Menu, Back and Search” are – unlike the Nexus one – real hardware buttons. The HTC Desire has a 3.7″ AMOLED display and the same 5 Megapixel Camera with Auto focus and a LED-flashlight we also saw in the HTC Legend.

The HTC Desire has an 1 GHz snapdragon processor 512 MB of ROM-memory and 576 MB of RAM-Memory , which should make sure that the speed and stability of the phone is at a high level.

HTC Sense

The software features the latest version of  HTC Sense with an application and widget called HTC Friend Stream. With this application you can see the status update from all your contacts from different sources. So updates from your facebook-friends and twitter-friends and other services can be displayed in one single view. There’s an other feature in the new HTC Sense interface called: Leap. With leap you can pinch anywhere on your home screen and see a zoomed-out overview of all your home screens.
The HTC Hero as well as some other HTC Android Phones also gets this sense update so that current users can also benefit from the new HTC Sense with all it’s features.

Pricing and availability

The HTC Legend should be available in Europe in March and the Desire should be available in Q2 of 2010.  Without any contract the the HTC Legend is priced at 449 Euro and the HTC Desire is prices at 499 Euro.

Final thoughts

Looking at the pricing and the availability I would definitely recommend waiting for the HTC Desire. For just 50 euro more you get a 3.7″ AMOLED screen in stead of a 3.2″ and you get a 1 GHz Snapdragon chipset in stead of a 600 MHz.