HTC
Legend

HTC announced the Legend in 2010 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It was one of the show's most notable announcements. 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 Hero's traditional mechanical trackball with a flush, sensitive optical trackpad. It also featured a vibrant 3.2-inch AMOLED display, offering significantly better contrast and deeper blacks than the LCD panels many competitors used. HTC had to overcome considerable challenges with this approach, including how the antenna would work and how the battery, SIM card, and memory cards would fit 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 HTC developed to run on top of the Android OS. The Legend introduced the latest version of Sense UI, offering more integrated access to social networks. It also improved navigation with a "leap" function that let users display thumbnails of all seven standby screens with a pinch gesture on the home screen. The Mobile Phone Museum has several HTC Legend units. The unit shown in the picture is a rare prototype.