HTC Tips Their Hand(sets) - The UpStream

At HTC's Media presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, they showed off a nice collection of new handsets and gave us some interesting information on some known handsets.

First, we'll cover the Desire, because everyone is mostly familiar with it. It is a the Google Nexus One, with HTC Sense and a loss of the older roller ball and replaced with the newer trackpad. We all know that the first thing to go on an older Blackberry was the roller, so replacing that was a good idea. It will also ship with Flash 10.1 stock, so you will definitely get to take advantage of that 1GHz processor in ways the Nexus still hasn't.

Next is the Legend. Essentially an updated Hero, both in look and in power. The body is molded out of a single piece of aluminum, so there are no seams. That means 2 things: there are less fault lines for the device to fail on and there is no way for you to change the battery (we are assuming). We thought HTC had learned from Apple's missteps, but perhaps not. They did learn from the Hero that roller balls are bad, so they have also replaced this one with a trackpad. Of course it still has Sense, but it has the newest version to go along with Android 2.1.

This one was a bit of a shocker. In addition to some information about the HD2, they announced the HD Mini. This is a scaled down version of the HD2. It is a typical beautiful HTC handset, but breaks from the norm by not hiding the screws. It is featuring Windows Phone 6.5.3 and, of course, Sense (but will be one of the last WinMo phones to sport it with Windows Phone 7's new rules).

No carrier information was available for any of these devices, but we can make some guesses. The HD Mini will follow its big brothers to T-Mobile, the Legend will follow the Hero to Sprint, and the Desire will be T-Mobile and/or AT&T. If you want to see more details about any or all of these new handsets, hit the link below.