HTC Magic

Hi, I'm Flora Graham and this is the HTC Magic. The Magic is HTC's follow-up to the G1, and we think it's a big improvement. It's smaller and slimmer, and it looks more sexy and less geeky. You might miss the G1's slide-out qwerty keyboard, if you don't like using an on-screen one. But we found the Magic's soft keyboard responsive and easy to use; and it's got good predictive text so even if your typing is a bit mangled you still get good results. There are quite a few buttons on the front, for a touchscreen phone, including call-answer and hang-up buttons. There's also a Blackberry-style trackball nubbin, which is handy for scrolling around fiddly web pages, where you might accidentally click something if you're using your finger on the touchscreen. But in general, we thought that it was overkill to have all these buttons and a trackball, when the touchscreen works really well. It's nice and responsive, and the user interface is snappy and looks good. It's maybe not quite as smooth as the iPhone for scrolling, and it doesn't support multi-touch -- but it's a close second. The Magic runs Google's Android operating system, and it's very Google-oriented. You use Google to sync your calendar and contacts, and all the Google apps are on here -- Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Google maps in particular works great with the phone's GPS and built-in compass. And it has a very cool feature when you're using Street View -- you can turn on the compass so that, as you move the phone, the view pans in real-time, so you're looking at the street in the direction you're pointing the phone. There's also the Android App Market, where you can download programs and games, similar to the iPhone app store. Most of the stuff on there is still free, and Android's rules are a lot more lax than Apple's, so you can find some great apps and they're easy to install. The Magic also has a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back, which can also shoot video. But there's no flash, so you'll need good light, and we found the image quality pretty average. We were disappointed that the Magic doesn't have a standard 3.5 millimetre headphone jack. There's just one USB socket that has to share the job of charging and syncing the phone, and listening to music. But it does support stereo Bluetooth, so that could solve the headphone issue if you're willing to shell out for Bluetooth headphones. The Magic isn't quite as slick as the iPhone, but it's a big step up from the G1, and it's got the flexibility and open-source cred of Google Android. If you've been wanting an Android phone, but you've been holding off till they get good, now could be the time to go for it.