The Legend is now listed on HTC’s Indian website for well over a week now, but no official word yet. We’re used to a bit of hoohaa around a product of this pedigree, after all, we’re talking about an upgrade to the HTC Hero, which was one of the best android smartphone available last year. A scan through google shows prices as low as Rs 24,990, we’re not sure if these are grey market prices or official prices. Thinkdigit has put a price of Rs 36,990 on it.

Update: The official launch price is Rs 25,990. That’s a good price for a very exciting Android phone, surely beats other offerings we’ve had in India so far.



Specs and size-wise, the Legend and the Hero are quite similar , the Legend adds the Android 2.1 Eclair update, an AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, and an optical trackpad. The 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200A on the Hero has been replaced by a 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM 7227 processor. The Legend has 384 MB RAM, in comparison to the Hero’s 288 MB RAM.

After the disappointing Symbian S60-based Nokia N97 and the Maemo-based N900, it’s a bit difficult to take any new Nokia flagship seriously. So when the company launches the Nokia-8, based on the new open-source Symbian^3 operating system, the great hardware on board convince us as an iPhone-killer.

The N8 is expected to retail at 370 euros in Europe, which comes to approximately Rs. 22,000. We would expect the cost to be a lot more by the time it gets slapped with custom duty and taxes in India.

So what does the phone come with? For starters, there’s a 3.5-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen (16 million colours, 360×640 pixels), 680MHz processor and 3D graphics accelerator, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack, VGA videocall camera, 16GB of onboard storage, microSD card slot (up to 32GB), a battery with 12 and half hours of talk-time, and pretty much everything else you can think of.

Microsoft launches new Kin One and Kin Two ‘social phones’

It had long been rumoured that Microsoft was looking to get into the mobile phone market, with the supposed ‘Project Pink’ being the inaugural two handsets it launches. Well, all those reports have turned out to be true as the company yesterday unveiled the kin series of ‘social phones’.

Both the phones are manufactured by Sharp and are intended at a younger audience, or those for whom social networking with the phone is more important than business-related productivity.


The Kin One is the entry-level handset that rocks a touchscreen (presumably capacitive, since MS says it’s easy to navigate with your thumb) that slides up to reveal a compact QWERTY keyboard, which Microsoft says can be used with even one hand. It comes with a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and standard video recording, 4GB of memory and a mono speaker.


The Kin Two sports a wider touchscreen with also a wider QWERTY keyboard for comfortable two-handed texting. The specs receive a bump here, as the camera gets upgraded to an 8-megapixel affair that can shoot HD video; the memory doubles to 8GB; and stereo speakers promise to let you do away with the headphones.

Nokia X2 music phone and Ovi Music Unlimited

Nokia is on a roll. After releasing a bunch of new phones and the flagship N8, the company is now stepping it up in the ‘mobile music’ segment as it unveiled the X2 music phone and the Ovi Music Unlimited service in India.

The XpressMusic series of phones has been making waves for some time now, and Nokia seems to be slowly rebranding it to the ‘X’ series. The new X2 is a candybar handset in the same line as the popular Nokia 5310 and the Nokia 5130, sporting a 2.2-inch screen, 48MB of internal memory and a microSD slot (up to 16GB), dedicated music keys, 3.5mm headphone jack, stereo FM radio and all the other features you would look for in a music-oriented phone.


The company hasn’t skimped on the camera either, throwing in a 5-megapixel sensor with autofocus and LED flash. Nice! There’s no 3G or Wi-Fi here to jack up the price, and you’ll have easy connectivity with your PC via Bluetooth (with A2DP) or the microUSB port.

Along with all this, the battery life of the phone is tremendously impressive as it claims over 13 hours of talk-time, 27 hours of music playback and 26 days of standby time. Wow!

Samsung non-Corby affordable touchscreen phone, the S5620 Monte

While Samsung’s Corby line of phones has been the forerunner in its sub-10,000 price range of touchscreen mobile phones, the company does have a few other gizmos up its sleeve. The new S5620 Monte promises great value for money with its 3-inch screen, great music capabilities and GPS.
Featuring a capacitive touchscreen running on the TouchWiz 2.0 UI, we were a bit surprised to see that the handset comes with GPS. It’s not often that you see a phone priced at Rs. 8,850 packing such impressive specs.

Here’s the full feature run-down of the Samsung S5620 Monte:

Charismatic line, Comfortable grip: If you have an expressive style, you will appreciate the charismatic design statement Monte makes. The sleek form with visually striking colour stripe is impressive to look at, making it the stylish choice for modern users that is full of personality.