HTC announces 2 Google Android phones on MWC2010

HTC continues to remind me of Sony and the way they released new CLIE devices faster than I could ever hope to keep up. Both also make very high quality products that I enjoy using and that end up draining my mobile device fund. At MWC in Spain this week HTC announced three new devices, but unfortunately there is no information that we will see any of them here in the US. Two of the new devices are Google Android smartphones and the other is a Windows Mobile 6.5.3 device. If you recall, HTC purchased One & Co in 2008 and you will see major influences from them in the designs of these three new smartphones. The HTC Legend and HTC Desire are the new Android devices and the HD mini is the Windows Mobile device.

HTC Legend

The HTC Legend takes a design tip from the Apple MacBooks with unibody aluminum construction. You will also find an optical trackball, slight chin, and buttons that are physical ones even though they might appear to be capacitive touch sensitive ones. The Legend has a 3.2 inch AMOLED HVGA display and runs Google Android 2.1 with a 600 MHz processor. HTC also will be including their updated version of Sense UI that includes a new Friend stream and groups of widgets. Friend stream offers a single place for Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter streams.

HTC Desire

The HTC Desire is essentially a Google Nexus One with HTC Sense UI. It has the 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 3.7 inch AMOLED display, Android 2.1, and all the rest of the Nexus One goodness. The latest version of Sense is included, along with some other improvements and widgets. For example, you can long press text in the web browser and look up words in a dictionary or Wikipedia, you can send paragraphs to Google Translate, and also use new email, weather, and Agenda view widgets. I personally find a lot of value in HTC Sense, but unfortunately all of us Google Nexus One owners won’t get this Sense update since it is an HTC add on and the Nexus One is a Google-branded device.