From what HTC had on offer at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year, the Taiwanese company looks set for a pretty hot 2010. Now South Africans can get a taste of Desire, Legend and Smart goodness, with the launch of these three HTC smartphones yesterday in Johannesburg. They will be making their in-store appearance on the 1st of May.   

HTC Desire

It's the HTC Desire that grabbed the headlines at MWC this year, and it's seen as a serious rival to the Google Nexus One. With the Nexus One not available in SA the Desire has an open road ahead, being the first phone in SA to feature the new Android 2.1 update dubbed Éclair (alongside its smaller brother the Legend). The Desire incorporates Qualcomm's very speedy 1 GHz Snapdragon processor and a delicious 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touch-screen. Inside you'll find all the mod cons usually associated with top of the range smartphones including aGPS, Wi-Fi, HSDPA and a 5 megapixel camera with face detection. We've grown to love HTC's Sense user interface, with the Desire (and the Legend) employing a new enhanced version of Sense that includes HTC Friend Stream that aggregates all social communication from Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into an organised flow of updates. 

HTC Legend

Featuring a good-looking aluminum uni-body design, the HTC Legend looks a lot like last year's Phone of the Year, the Hero. For consumers that find modern-day smartphones just not that pocketable anymore, the smaller Legend might be a safer bet. Although it only makes use of a 600 MHz processor, our first impressions were that it's still very fast. It basically contains all the features of its bigger brother, but with a smaller capacitive touch-screen standing at 3.2" and actually a longer talk time with HTC claiming 440 minutes. 

HTC Smart

Smartphones have a tendency to be overpriced, but the same mistake is not made with the Smart, retailing at a comfortable R2499. Instead of being Android-based it runs on Qualcomm’s Brew Mobile Platform (Brew MP) operating system, designed by Qualcomm to enable HTC's Sense UI to run on cheaper phones. The Smart with its 2.8" resistive touch-screen, does have HSDPA but there is no Wi-Fi or GPS onboard. It includes a 3 megapixel camera.