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The days when the T-Mobile G1 was the big cheese in the Android world are happily gone. Now, the Android OS is being used to create some truly industry leading handsets and HTC is behind some of the best.

But which is the one for you to spend your hard-earned on? The Hero-a-like Legend? The insanely powerful but stupidly monikered Desire? Or do you trust your mobile dollar in Google with the Nexus One?

The HTC Legend

What makes a phone good? Well, the easy answer is one that packs the most into the smallest frame - but Apple came along with the iPhone and changed that perception almost overnight.

No, apparently what's best is the combination of beautiful hardware and a slick user experience - so step forward the HTC Legend.

If you imagine an HTC Hero met an Apple Macbook Air one night in a bar, got along famously and ended up getting so drunk that they woke up shame-facedly together in the morning, this would be the result.

The HTC Legend is hewn from a single block of aluminium, giving it a polished and expensive look, in the Marmite-esque 'lip' chassis. Not only that, but the 3.2-inch screen is actually an OLED, which means colours are gloriously saturated and the blacks are wonderfully dark.

The HTC Sense UI is also in full force here, and while we could witter on about the social networking integration in the contacts menu or the improved camera UI, we just care about the fact we can pinch the home screen in to view all our open widgets in one glance (called Leap view).

We're also digging the ability to see all our friends' feeds in one place through Friend Stream - we know that it's an option on the HTC Desire as well, but it seems to suit the Legend a little more.

It's a smooth, sleek and ultimately satisfying to hold phone - and it's packing a fair whack of grunt under the hood as well.

Who's gonna buy the Legend? If you're the kind of person that values form as much as functionality (and for some reason don't want the iPhone) then you should definitely give the HTC Legend the once over.

Sure, it's not got the processing power of the Desire or the bells and whistles of Google's device, but it looks superb, handles better than most phones out there and what's more - it shouldn't break the bank when it appears.

Read TechRadar's in-depth HTC Legend review