Cool Gadget | PDA Phone

Design

Without a doubt, the main reason one would pick the Magic over the Dream is the form factor. At 113 x 55.6 x 13.7mm, the Magic is an extremely compact smartphone which doesn’t weigh much, too, at just 116g. The colors available are white and black. Both versions come with a glossy finish, so oily smudges and fingerprints are a given with the Magic. Like the Dream, the bottom part of Magic’s chassis sticks out a little. Think talkshow host Jay Leno’s chin. Going by these two products and leaked shots of HTC’s upcoming devices, this seems the defining design factor for its smartphones based on Android. We put this down as a purely design element because the handset’s microphone is found on the bottom edge, so the protrusion won’t do anything more than if the entire front surface was flat. 

The 3.2-inch screen on this smartphone has a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. Because it is of the capacitive variety, a stylus will not work on this display, similar to the iPhone and HTC Dream. One of the features we have gotten used to in many smartphones is the light sensor on the front that helps to adjust screen brightness automatically. This feature is not available on the Magic, so those who switch from indoor to sunny outdoor environments frequently may have to adjust the screen settings regularly. Aside from that inconvenience, the Magic’s display is sharp and the touch surface sensitive. 

The six buttons on the front of the Magic include the regular crop of Home, Menu, Back and Search, not to mention the standard Call and Hang up keys. The improvement over the Dream is really the larger trackball. This makes it easier to use and also more obvious when it flashes, which happens when you have new notifications on the device. The only other physical button(s) on the device are the volume controls on the left side. 

On the base of the Magic is a single mini-USB port. This covers charging, syncing and connecting a wired headset, similar to many other HTC smartphones. This also means you don’t get a dedicated 3.5mm audio connector, which can be a pain if your phone is also your primary music device. To use a regular set of headphones, an optional adapter is required. The Magic also comes with a microSD card slot behind the battery cover for memory expansion, which doesn’t require you to remove the battery to access.

Features

The HTC Magic is capable of HSPA data downloads over the cellular network up to 7.2Mbps and uploads up to 2Mbps. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi for Internet access at hotspots, Bluetooth and GPS for satellite navigation.

Also found in the Magic is a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back. This comes with autofocus but no flash capabilities. We tried a few shots with the Magic and found photos to be generally of good quality for a smartphone, though the autofocus feature felt a little slow. This smartphone is also capable of video capture with a maximum resolution of 352 x 288 pixels.

Hardware and wireless features aside, the most important specification of the HTC Magic is that it’s the first device to come with Android 1.5. The new onscreen keyboard is one of its upgrades over the original, allowing the Magic to be designed without a physical keypad. HTC further customized this soft keyboard and the one you see shipped in the Magic has full QWERTY, numeric with T9 and Chinese handwriting layouts. The numeric keypad layout is very similar to what’s found on the HTC Touch series of devices running on Windows Mobile. This is optimized for one-handed typing and we found it to be very useful when on-the-go, especially if you are commuting and need to hold onto something with the other hand. Switching between this layout and the full-QWERTY one is a long-winded process, requiring multiple screen taps and entering a separate settings page. 

In the full-QWERTY layout, auto correction of text is turned on by default. In cases where you mis-tap letters, the software will try to guess what you intended to type and give you that option. For example, if you miss the final “t” when spelling “about” and end up with “abour”, the keyboard guesses your intention and pressing space or enter will give you the correct word. What was annoying is that it takes many steps to turn off this predictive text option. There is no button on the keyboard to toggle it and you end up going deep into the settings page to change it. This is frustrating when you want to type in a colloquialism or acronym without adding it to the dictionary. Another annoyance was that even though the onscreen buttons enlarge when your finger makes contact with them (like on the iPhone), this was slow to occur and you would usually be moving your finger off to another letter before seeing what you’ve really typed in the last tap. This slows down accurate typing and definitely needs to be improved. 

Widgets have also been added to the Cupcake revision of Android. These are useful gadgets you can add to the Home screen such as a digital clock in favor of the default analog one or a Wi-Fi toggle button so you don’t need to enter the settings page to turn on that feature. New widgets can be found on the Android Marketplace with many of them available for free. 

Copy-and-paste has been enabled in the body text for the browser, which means you can takes chunks of text and forward them in emails or text messages. Regrettably, you cannot paste phone numbers copied from the browser into the phone dialer. This means that even with copy-and-paste, finding a restaurant’s phone number for reservation will require you to remember and dial it manually–very counter-intuitive. 

Aside from those mentioned, HTC has added another important feature–Microsoft Exchange support. Once this is set up, you’ll be able to get your Exchange mail, calendar and contacts on the Magic, a critical feature for business users who need constant access to their corporate email.

Performance And Conclusion

The 1,340mAh battery in the HTC Magic gave it a battery life of about 1.5 days on a single charge. This was better than the one day we got with the Dream, but would still require daily charging, especially if you use a lot of data and turn on mail auto-sync. 

Audio quality of calls was good and we did not experience dropped calls during our review period. The speakerphone was also loud enough for use in reasonably quiet environments–no complaints there. 

Though it isn’t perfect, Android 1.5 is a significant improvement over the first version, and software-wise, the Magic is much improved over the Dream. It does have a few niggles that require sorting out, especially for text input. The good news is that these can all be changed with software updates, and hopefully, HTC will make the Magic better with time.

[posted by John Chan]