HTC made its presence felt with the highly regarded smartphone the Legend. Following up the success of that device, HTC has released its successor known as the Desire. The company hopes that the continuation of an already impressive phone will leave the competition behind. The Desire bears significant resemblance to the Nexus One, but it is not a direct clone, nor is it an inferior piece.

The HTC Desire separates itself right out of the box with a greater usability thanks to the inclusion of HTC Sense. It is ever so slightly larger than the Nexus One, measuring 119 x 60 x 11.9mm. This is still obviously not huge by any means, and offers an adequate housing for the roomy 3.7-inch, OLED capacitive screen. An AMOLED display delivers 800 x 480 pixel resolution, placing it at the top of the Android field.

A display this impressive needs to be paired with a camera that is also of high quality. Although it may not blow the doors off the joint, the 5-megapixel camera from the Legend is brought to the Desire. Maybe not exactly completely complementary to the display, the camera still offers an aspect ratio of 5:3 on its still images which is a nice, wide picture. The video recorder on the Desire shoots in 800 x 480p resolution, an improvement over the Legend and the Nexus One. In low light, the Desire’s recorder does reduce frame rate, but this is in order to extend exposure time to compensate for relatively dark settings.

HTC, as previously mentioned, has placed their Sense user interface on the Desire in addition to Android 2.1. Features such as the weather effects found on it allow the display to really show what it can do. Sense provides the user with seven homescreens and unveils the Live View, a feature that displays the seven panels as thumbnails. Applications are a vital component of any smartphone, as is the ability to perform tasks simultaneously. The Desire comes equipped with a breathtaking 576MB of RAM, allowing it to handle all the apps a time you could possibly want. New to the Desire is Friend Stream, basically the HTC equivalent to Motoblur, which pulls Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter updates into a single timeline.

The HTC Desire has basically taken the best features of the Legend and freshened them up. Because the previous phone was already top notch, the Desire remains near the top of the Android game. Sometimes it’s best to go with what works.