In a show where new gizmos stare at you from every corner, HTC this morning just launched what looks like the best phone here at Mobile World Congress, with a Hero-like Android phone called the Legend.

I say ¨Hero-like¨because it is shaped like a Hero, but has a new aluminium unibody that is sleek yet strong enough to withstand knocks (the HTC folks did a drop test at the launch here). What´s more, there´s a new version of HTC Sense thrown in, so the user-interface is actually more friendly than Google´s Nexus One.

We can say now we had a hands-on previously with the Legend, but did not write about it because we didn´t want our source to lose his/her job! We were impressed then, and we are impressed today at the launch of the device.

First, the unibody. There´s a hell of a lot of work put in this, we understand, because aluminium prevents cellphone signals from going in and out of the phone. What HTC did was to place the antenna at the bottom – near the mouthpiece – and transmit out of a plastic part at the bottom (the black portion). This is also where you slot in your SIM card.

The touch and feel is top class on the Legend. Like the Nexus One, also made by HTC, the finish is smooth and the metal – cut from one block of aluminium – has the premium feel. No faux metal here.

Running Android 2.1, the Legend will also please many Android fans. And out of the box, it supports pinch and zoom, a feature that the Nexus One only recently provided an update for.

So overall, how does the new Legend compare with the Nexus One, which many goondus here are nuts about?

To start off, the Legend has an excellent AMOLED screen, so contrast and colour are as good as on the Nexus One. There´s also the excellent HTC Sense, which includes a Friends stream that basically keeps all your conversations  – social media, e-mail and SMS – with each friend on a single screen. Nifty.

The hardware, though, might lose some to the Nexus One, especially if you are a hardware specs geek. The screen resolution is 320 x 480 (The Nexus One has an amazing 800 x 480), the display is 3.2 inches wide (N1= 3.7 inches) and the processor runs at a speed of 600MHz (N1= 1GHz).

But if you are more into the experience than the specs, the Legend is surely not far off. I´d say HTC Sense is a hell of a lot better than the “Google experience” on the Nexus One, which includes rarely-used voice search capabilities and turn-by-turn navigation, which is still not yet available in Singapore.

For a closer comparison to the Nexus One, there´s the HTC Desire, also launched today. No fancy unibody here  – just a simple, Nexus One-like look. It also sports the top-end specs of the Nexus One – 800 x 480 screen, 3.7-inch display and 1GHz processor. It even weighs 1-gram lighter on paper!

Still, among the three phones from HTC today – there´s also the HD mini, essentially a smaller version of the Windows Phone-based HD2 – I´m still most impressed by the Legend. This, for me, is the phone in this year´s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Few may have heard of HTC a few years ago, but this time, these folks from Taiwan are really upping the game, not just in the industrial design, but with the experience offered by software such as HTC Sense and the Android 2.1.

Going by the phones launched here, HTC looks to be the one to beat this year.

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Once in a while, a phone can come along and seriously wow you just by its looks.

HTC’s new “hero” phone, aptly called the Hero, is one such gizmo that is just begging to be carried in your hands. Dressed in white and dark brown, this looks at first like a HTC Touch Diamond 2 with Google Android in its DNA. But look closer, and you’d find a few surprises.

Announced yesterday, the 135-gram phone comes with the a generous 3.2-inch screen, 5-meg camera, 7.2Mbps 3.5G downloads and many other goodies.

More importantly, it appears to be a real multi-touch phone that lets you “pinch” the screen to zoom in and out of a webpage, a la the iPhone.

But if you think this is just another copy of the iPhone, then you’re sadly mistaken. Take a quick online tour of the gizmo at the HTC site, and it’s clear the handset maker and Google have come up with an interface that possibly matches and extends beyond the iPhone’s.

For starters, widgets appear to be easily moved on screen, and you also can choose which screen suits your mood (“weekend or “work”, for example).

Another nice touch comes from the integration of all your transactions with a contact, from your SMSes to e-mails to Facebook conversations or Flikr photos. In other words, you can just slide your thumb along and see all these interactions you’ve had with your friend (or boss) faster than ever.

I’ve been an HTC fan since the Touch Diamond, which I still use, and I’ve been particularly impressed by the Androids that have come out of the Taiwanese phone maker. More than just clones of one popular model, these “half-humans” are getting new features with each release, and HTC looks hard to stop this year with the Hero.

Forget the iPhone 3GS re-spin. Instead, look out for the Hero when it is out in July in Europe “later in the summer” in Asia.

We’ll check for more details on local pricing when they become available, likely in the coming month or two.

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