I bought my HTC legend on contract, I initially was after a blackberry as they seem very popular and mainly due to the blackberry messenger function. However I become more and more aware of blackberrys breaking very easily I was open minded to what phone I wanted. I use facebook to social network a lot, send over 300 texts a day and use the internet on a regular basis; therefore the most important thing for me was a good contract and a phone that is incredibly easy to type on. I found all of this with the HTC legend.
I am a newbie with touch screens and was cautious about it to begin with as a lot of the older touch screens broke quite easily and were quite temperamental and difficult. However the HTC's orientation settings meant that the buttons on the QWERTY keyboard were incredibly easy to press and if a mistake was made the strong dictionary and spell check function would correct it instantly and new words are also added very easily.
Text messaging can be set up in either a inbox and sent box layout or in a conversation so you can read what both participants have said one after the other which can be very useful for longer conversations.
The phone can be made to be very individual with a number of different widgets and applications available from the android market so if you are not too keen on one theme it can be adapted to suit you and your lifestyle better.
By being made out of one piece of aluminium the phone is very stylish, however it is not one of the lightest phones on the market but this is quite pleasant as it easily fits into your hand and you know that it is there and sturdy.
The 4 buttons at the bottom of the screen are key to the working and setting up of the phone and are incredibly easy to understand and operate. There is also a track pad but this does seem quite pointless as you can easily navigate yourself around the phone by using the touch screen.
The flashing LED lets you know when you have any notifications, this means that you need to keep unlocking your phone to check if you have that all important text message.
A number of very good contracts are available on this phone for around the £25 mark including unlimited texts and internet.
There are only two drawbacks to this phone:
1. The battery life, if you are a heavy user of your phone like me by texting a lot and accessing the internet regularly you can sometimes struggle for it to last the whole day. It is defiantly a phone that needs to be charged every night and sometimes during the day. I would recommend either buying an in car charger or a spare battery.
2. Text message storage, although the phone does have a lot of memory when a text message conversation reaches over roughly 150 texts it can take a few seconds to load, that doesn't sound like much but when you have a lot of conversations on the go it can be quite tedious. Obviously this is easily prevented by deleting texts regularly and the special ones can be locked for safe keeping.

All in all an excellent phone with two drawbacks that can be easily solved.