HTC Legend v Nexus One v Desire

I've just spent 20 minutes on a conference call, using the HTC Legend and I think my ear is bleeding. To explain, I'd had my O2 Sim card in the phone off and on for a week or so and had been enjoying surfing the web and emailing and texting and Tweeting (yes I am one of those twats, sorry) and it was all going well. It was only a second or so into the call that I realised I had not, as yet, used the latest in HTC's roster of Android devices as an actual telephone.

I waxed lyrical about the design of the HTC Legend when it was announced at Mobile World Congress and it is beautiful. Made from a single milled piece of aluminium it is a brilliant piece of engineering (and the fact that it is made from one piece of metal means you can drop it without it breaking in half) and lovely to look at and use to access the internet.

The phones I've been using myself for the past month are HTC's two other new Android devices, the Nexus One – otherwise known as the Google phone – and the HTC Desire. The innards of the two phones are essentially identical and the difference on the outside is minimal. The big difference is in the user interface: the Nexus One is the device over which Google has had complete control, while the HTC Desire has HTC Sense layered over the top of it.

The HTC Legend, meanwhile, has been available for a couple of weeks in the UK and is exclusive to Vodafone. Vodafone is also supposed to be stocking the Nexus One soon-ish, but it keeps being delayed because the search engine company has realised that selling a mobile phone takes a bit more customer service than just lobbing the device into the market.

Anyway, the thing that has most surprised me about the Nexus One is that it is actually quite a nice phone to use as a phone. The iPhone has always made me feel like I am standing in a portable loo while calling someone. It is all echoes and feedback. The Nexus One, in contrast, feels, and most importantly sounds, like a phone.

The HTC Legend, however, is cutting edge and not just in its design. It literally has a cutting edge. When it arrived in the UK, the Palm Pre came in for some criticism because when the keyboard was slid out, the plastic edge was sharp enough to slice cheese (which lead to the inevitable YouTube clips). Well the HTC Legend goes one better, that lovely milled aluminium case will slice your ear off when you hold the phone up to it and apply any pressure whatsoever.

Why am I getting so het up about the device as a phone? Well firstly too many of the recent crop of smartphones have been rubbish AS PHONES. And secondly, form factor is one of the biggest differences between the Nexus One and HTC Legend. Both run the latest version of Android – Éclair – and can multitask and while the processor is faster on the Nexus One, I did not notice any major difference in performance compared with the HTC Legend, except in the area of battery life.

The Nexus One's battery life is dire, comparable with the first batch of serious 3G phones, such as the SonyEricsson V800. Initially I had it checking and alerting me to everything from my office email to Twitter every five minutes. With a little bit of emailing and perhaps a quick game of Robo Defense, a game to which I have become tragically addicted, the battery was gone in a few hours. A few basic energy saving tips, such as stopping the trackball from flashing when new emails arrived, using vibrating alerts solely for texts and turning down the screen brightness and the battery would just about get through a working day. Just. The battery life of the HTC Desire seemed slightly better to me, but as there is no difference in the batteries or processors of the two devices I would put that down to HTC Sense's better power management. I did not worry half as much when I realised that I had left the charger for the HTC Legend at home.

The third point of differentiation between the three phones is the most obvious: that while the Nexus One has Google's unadulterated version of Android, HTC put its HTC Sense "skin" on top of it for the Desire and Legend. HTC Sense is hit and miss. For the Legend, it's a miss, for the Desire, it's a hit.

HTC Sense leaves the Legend looking very cramped. It lends itself much more readily to the larger screen on the Desire. It integrates some basic functions such as Facebook and Twitter – through the pre-installed Peep client – but serious social networking junkies will probably prefer to set themselves up with multiple downloadable clients. The HTC Sense keyboard, meanwhile, is dire on both devices, containing all the normal qwerty keys plus a huge number of extra keys that have been grey-scaled over the top to make it nice and confusing.

The Nexus One opts for the traditional qwerty keyboard but neither keyboard is as elegant or responsive as the iPhone. The Nexus One, meanwhile, integrates search much better across the device – as you would hope – than either HTC device, partly though the use of the "search" function key on the phone.

Those search keys are part of the physical difference between the devices: the Nexus One opts for a trackball while the HTC Legend and HTC Desire have an optical trackpad. To be honest, they are both pointless. A properly working touchscreen interface and they would be utterly redundant. The HTC Desire and Legend also have four hard function keys at the bottom of the screen: a home button; a menu button that brings up relevant menus depending upon which application you are using; a back button, which cleverly works across apps so if you move from say, email to a Twitter client, pressing back will take you back to email; and that search function.

The Nexus One has the same buttons – though the search button seems to work better across any application on the Google device – but they are part of the touchscreen. As a result, many is the time I thought I was pressing the space bar when composing an email on the Nexus One and instead sent myself back to the home screen.

All three can, of course, download a host of applications from the Android Marketplace – which, unfortunately, is where Android still falls down. The sooner Google – or perhaps one of the mobile phone operators – realises that a third party arbiter of applications really is needed, the better. Having to hunt through countless pages of reviews (which divide neatly into obvious fan boy who probably had a hand in writing the app, creator of rival app slagging it off and plugging their product, and nutter out on day release who just wandered into a cyber cafe) in order to judge whether an app is useful or might actually be malware designed to steal all your information, is only going to appeal to a small minority of users.

Android's marketplace is based on Darwinian evolutionary principles coupled with the wisdom of crowds, which is great if you only ever want early adopters to use your devices, but Google wants Android to challenge Apple's dominance in apps. It will never manage that unless the Marketplace becomes as "professional" as iTunes. Like the fact that you need customer service staff when you start selling hardware, Google has to realise that when you start offering goods through a central marketplace, someone has to carry the can for their quality. The "crowd" won't do.

Back to the devices. And finally, as befits a device that has Google's logo on the back of it, the Nexus One is elegant when accessing the internet. So are the Desire and Legend. Pages are crisp and responsive (pinch and zoom perhaps a bit too responsive). Both devices make the web look sharp while the iPhone often rounds the corners off the web.

In fact, that's the HTC Legend's problem writ large: it's just a bit too sharp, so for me it's a choice between the Nexus One and HTC Desire and it's going to be the latter. During a few weeks of use I had to reboot the Nexus One several times a week to deal with various functions that just seemed to die-off from time to time, especially email synchronisation. The HTC Desire did not require any rebooting.

Finally, the volume button on the side of the Nexus One seized up after a few weeks. While that's not a problem for setting the level of media, ringtone and alarm volume – as all can be set through the phone's settings – there is no work around for in-call volume, meaning that anyone who called me also deafened me.

For the sake of my ears, I relied on the HTC Desire.

HTC Legend

Pros: Stylish design, good battery life for an Android device.

Cons: That sleek design comes at a potentially painful price.

Nexus One

Pros: Screen makes the web come alive; integrates messaging, maps and search very well.

Cons: Poor battery life and Marketplace apps can sometimes crash without warning. It's a phone you will find yourself rebooting occasionally.

HTC Desire

Pros: All the benefits of the Nexus One without the crashes

Cons: You have to struggle your way through the Android Marketplace looking for apps while iPhone users jeer at you for the lack of choice you have.