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Last year, HTC released the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, but the second handset to run the OS is also an HTC product. Meet the Magic – a slimmer and QWERTY-less smart phone, running on the Android 1.5 Cupcake OS. It is currently offered in Europe and Canada and is going to be available as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G in the States. We’ve had a chance to spend some time with the HTC Magic from TIM and are excited to share our experience. 
The Magic is packaged with a 2GB microSD card, an AC adapter, USB cable, wired stereo headset, and a carrying pouch. One thing lacking is an adapter for using 3.5mm headphones. Instead, you have to use miniUSB connector headphones like the ones provided unless you purchase your own adapter. Design The HTC Magic is smaller than the G1 in every way. It measures 4.45 x 2.19 x .54 inches (113 x 55.56 x 13.65 mm) and weighs in at 4.09 oz (116g) with the 1340mAh battery installed. It is significantly thinner than the G1, making the G1 rather clunky by comparison. The Magic’s thinness is possible due to the lack of the hardware QWERTY keyboard. The Magic is extremely friendly to one-handed operation due to its smaller size and on-screen keyboard – more about the Magic’s keyboard in a bit. 
Other than being thinner and sleeker, the Magic has retained the same button scheme as the G1, more of a requirement of the Android OS than anything else. Along the bottom, it has chrome-colored Home, Menu, Back, Google Search, Send, and a double-duty End/Power buttons. A trackball occupies the bottom center and lights up and pulses when a message is received. A simple, elegant volume rocker button is on the upper left side and a miniUSB port is on the bottom for charging, syncing, and headphones. The camera is located on the top center of the back, and the phone is rimmed with a strip of satin-finish material for a better grip. 
Like the G1, the HTC Magic has a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, making it very finger-friendly and is the main way for navigating around the Android OS. The screen is bright, crisp and clear and very responsive to touch, like tapping and scrolling with a finger swipe. The Magic is equipped with an accelerometer, so tilting it sideways will activate a smooth transition from portrait to landscape. Other than the home screen and dialer, screen rotation works in most other areas of the Android OS. User interface We covered the first version of the Android interface pretty extensively in our T-Mobile G1 review. The HTC Magic runs on the new v1.5 most commonly referred to as Cupcake, which brings a few tweaks but most things work the same way. That means that if you are making the switch from a Anrdroid 1.0-running HTC Dream or a G1 you won't find much to surprise you. 
One of the biggest changes that Cupcake brought was the on-screen keyboard. We won't get into a virtual vs. hardware keyboards argument - both have pros and cons and which is best depends strongly on how the user works with the device and what they use it for. The virtual keyboard is a nice option to have even if there is a hardware one, but it's not perfect. For one - the keyboard shortcuts are gone. In the G1, pressing the Search key + B launched the browser. You can't do that with the HTC Magic as there's no "B" key. 
The homescreen of Android is very reminiscent of a computer's desktop - you have shortcuts and folders, not just widgets as other UIs have. A new addition in the 1.5 version, which we caught a glimpse of in the Samsung I7500 Galaxy preview, is Live folders. The main difference with ordinary folders is that the live folders are automatically filled with content. All sorts of lists can go into Live folders - for example, you can have a folder that contains all the tweets from a contact, or an RSS feed, or maybe even a folder with all the good restaurants within walking distance from a given location. 
The preinstalled Live folders are "Contacts with phone numbers" and "Starred contacts". They are filled with what you would expect them to be - contacts that have phone numbers or are starred. We'd have loved to see more - Live folders are a great feature, but an uncommon one - and if you it isn't promoted right, it might not pick up at all. 
Another inhabitants of the Android homescreen are the widgets. There are two new preinstalled widgets that come with the HTC Magic - calendar and music player. The music player widget is simple enough - has a play/pause button, a next track button and shows the currently running track name. The calendar widget is a little limited - it only shows upcoming events. That's nice since it manages to fit even long event descriptions but it doesn't show a monthly view mode, which is our preferred option on other UIs. TouchWiz, for example, shows a small image of the current month and tapping it makes the widget expand to fill almost the entire screen. 
Tapping a widget to expand it to a bigger and more functional version is a great idea that didn't make it into this version of Android. It'd have been pretty useful to have onboard - it might have saved the users a few "No more room on this homescreen" messages. The shortcuts, which have been around pretty much since the Graphical User Interface was invented, are here and despite their age they are still quite useful. A shortcut can lead to an app, a website, a contact (in which case the contacts picture is used as an icon), or even a playlist. Since you can open the notification area from wherever the top bar is visible, new events won't interrupt your work. You can slide the tray down like a window blind just enough to see more details about what has happened and if it doesn't need your immediate atention you can let it slide back up and continue where you left off. 
Android has some peculiarities too. It doesn't recognize the concept of "running" and "closed" applications. Instead it gives the impression that all apps are running all the time. The system may close an app that runs in the background to preserve resources but as soon as the user selects it again Android will restore it to its previous state so that the user never knows the app had actually been closed. Here might be a good place to say that there are actually two different versions of the HTC Magic. One has 288 MB of RAM, while the other comes with only 192MB. We had the former version for this review and we are pleased to say that all this background activity doesn't lead to any hang-ups or slowdowns. 
Holding down the Home key brings up a kind of "task switcher". It's not really a task switcher, though, as some of the applications you've already started may no longer appear running for the reasons described above. Still, the task switcher is useful as it gives you access to the six most recently used apps. The Keyboard Besides the physical size difference, one of the greatest differences between the Magic and the older G1 is the lack of a physical keyboard on the Magic. The iPhone’s on-screen keyboard is the keyboard by which all other on-screen keyboards are measured, and we’re glad to report that Google has delivered a keyboard experience that is at least on par with the iPhone and, dare we say, is better in some ways. The keyboard pops up in either portrait or landscape mode when text entry is needed. 
There are two main ways that this keyboard rises above the fray. First, each press of a key on the Magic’s on-screen QWERTY keyboard delivers haptic feedback, an ever-so-slight vibration for the user. One of the more difficult things to get accustomed to on a virtual keyboard is the lack of tactile feedback when a key is pressed, and the vibration response, even one as subtle as on the Magic, is very well done. 
Secondly, Google does a nice job implementing some on-screen helps when typing. A preview of the letter you type briefly appears above your finger press so you have a visual verification of what you are typing. If a different character is needed, just press and hold, then slide your finger across to the character needed to select it. Also, to further assist the typist who is all-thumbs, the Magic suggests words in a scrolling bar above the keyboard as you type. Then, just select the proper word and let the Magic correct your misspellings. It works just like, well, magic.
Typing in either portrait or landscape mode is fairly easy on the Magic. Landscape mode gives you more room for two-handed typing, and portrait brings the keyboard in closer together for easier one-handed typing. Camera HTC Magic has the same 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera as the G1, along with improved imaging abilities that have come along with Cupcake, now offering video capture and playback. Media can be shared via email, messaging, and better integration with YouTube for videos and Picasa for sharing photos. Unfortunately there is no LED flash or any other kind of lighting offered by the Magic, so low-light pictures look dark. It’s a good idea to have strong lighting for best results. Outdoor picture results are pretty good, but unfortunately lacking in finer details. 
Video recording and playback is as simple as one press of the button, but the quality is merely adequate for a smartphone. The video is rather jumpy, especially if you pan a little too quickly. By tapping the screen, a zoom slider appears on the left side of the phone display for zooming in and out of the subject matter when taking photos. This feature works pretty well and the autofocus manages to keep your picture in focus even when zooming. 
Connectivity After using an iPhone, it’s easy to get used to pinching and stretching to zoom in on points of interest on a web page. With the Magic and Android 1.5, you are left with the same zoom in/out controls as found on the G1, due to the lack of multitouch. However, there are still some good things to say about the Magic browser experience. Page rendering is fast and it’s easy to isolate the part of the page you want to view and zoom in or out for the best viewing experience. The Magic handles bookmarking very well, adding a current page easily or even selecting from a list of most-viewed pages and instantly adding them to your bookmark list. A history tab is also added to make previous page-viewing and bookmarking easier. 
Another added feature of Android 1.5 Cupcake is improved Bluetooth A2DP connectivity with wireless headphone support. Bluetooth is simple to connect and is very effective with both the stereo headset and traditional Bluetooth headset. Also, Wi-Fi quickly discovers and connects to new networks and re-connects to previous networks without difficulty. 
Unfortunately, the HTC Magic lacks native Microsoft Exchange support. You can set up your Gmail inbox or any POP3 or IMAP account, but no Exchange out of the box. Another connectivity disappointment is that there is no easy way to connect to a computer – the Magic will not show up as a USB drive and requires installing drivers and other adjustments. GPS navigation The HTC Magic GPS receiver needed a couple of minutes upon to achieve a satellite lock from cold start, which is quite a lot. Subsequent locks, as usual, were much faster to acquire. It comes as no surprise that the only application you can rely on for navigation right out of the box is Google Maps. Its interface is slightly different from what we've seen before. 
Quick double-tapping ca no longer be used for zooming in and out; instead, you now need to use the two virtual buttons at the bottom of the screen. These are hidden when not in use and only appear when you touch the screen. But despite the little changes, this is still the familiar Google Maps app we know and like. 
Quite naturally the HTC Magic also sports Street View mode. In fact, this mode is probably the best part of the Google Maps on HTC Magic. If the Street View is available in the area you're interested in you can open a 360-degree photographic view of the area. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the surroundings! 
Unfortunately, voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation isn't possible using Google Maps. Still, there is some kind of navigation: your route and current location appear on the screen so you'll reach your goal sometimes… assuming you can read maps of course. Luckily, there is a free app that allows turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation using the HTC Magic and it's called AndNav2. The latter uses Google Maps, again, but adds some extra features that justify the download. AndNav2 uses the inbuilt digital compass and you no longer have to turn the handset to orientate the map to match your direction. 
As mentioned, the AndNav2 app offers turn-by-turn navigation, which isn't bad at all. The voice-guided part, however, is questionable - to use it you need an extra, free app (Text-To-Speech Library) which supports English along with many other languages. Using text-to-speech engines instead of pre-recorded voices is bound to give you a horrific computerized voice output but still the app is helpful. Conclusion In a nutshell, the HTC Magic offers a slimmer and smaller form factor than the G1 but lacks a QWERTY keyboard. Software wise, they are almost identical (once the G1 is updated to Android 1.5) and there isn’t anything too cool about the Magic. It is a nice phone - it feels nice in the hand, the on-screen keyboard is well-implemented - but we are disappointed that it is lacking the Sense UI that would really give it the “WOW” factor. We can only hope it will be available as a software update. |
