HTC
Legend

The HTC Legend was announced in 2010 at the Mobile World Congress show held in Barcelona. It was considered one of the most notable announcements at the show. The HTC Legend was a highly anticipated successor to the HTC Hero. While the Hero had put HTC on the map as a design powerhouse, the Legend refined that vision, introducing an industry-leading level of craftsmanship that would set the standard for premium smartphones for years to come. It had a distinctive aluminium casing that echoed Apple's MacBook design language. Milled from a solid piece of metal, the casing offered structural integrity, a "cold-to-the-touch" premium feel, and an attractive finish.  Technologically, the Legend introduced several key upgrades. It replaced the traditional mechanical trackball found on the Hero with a flush, sensitive optical trackpad. It also featured a vibrant 3.2-inch AMOLED display, which offered significantly better contrast and deeper blacks than the LCD panels used by many competitors. HTC had to overcome considerable challenges with this approach, including how the antenna would function and how the battery, SIM card, and memory cards would be inserted into the device. The solution was a removable plastic cover at the base of the device, which revealed these elements and housed the antenna (see below). It also featured a 3.2-inch active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display. The Legend used HTC’s proprietary user interface, Sense, which it had developed to work on top of the Android OS. The Legend saw the arrival of the latest version of Sense UI, offering more integrated access to social networks. It also delivered improved navigation through a "leap" function that allowed users to display thumbnails of all seven standby screens by using a pinch gesture on the home screen. The Mobile Phone Museum has several HTC Legend units. The one show in the picture is a rare prototype unit.