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The HTC Magic is one of the few smartphones that uses the free operating system, Google Android. As a smartphone, it performs very well in managing your life and keeping you up-to-date. As a regular phone for everyday use, I feel that it has a lot to improve upon.
Physical feel
As a phone, it fit snugly in my hand. But then, I don't know if it would fit as nicely in a person with smaller hands. It also seemed a bit bulky to keep in a purse, so perhaps this isn't a phone that was designed for women or those who like something fashionable. Instead, given its features, it is clearly a phone that is meant for technophiles rather than fashionistas.
Physically, it is a solid one-piece device with no moving parts. Except for a detachable rear cover for the battery and SIM card, there is nothing else that requires sliding or flipping or such. Thus, there is no risk of damaging the phone because of a broken hinge or likewise. The rear cover does feel flimsy, and I was always worried that I would accidentally break the plastic piece when I was unsnapping it.
Well, okay, there is one movable piece: the trackball. But based on my experience, I used it so rarely that I didn't even remember that it was there! Thus I don't feel that that is a component that is in danger of suffering from too much wear-and-tear.
The screen is bright and renders the images clearly. My photos don't do it justice, but I had no problems with seeing the screen even under low-light conditions. As a touchscreen, it also worked well in responding to my finger's touch. There was no need to press too hard on the screen to register my intention. Sliding across the screen also worked when I used a light flick.
Text entry - keypad
But about the touchscreen, I had issues with its usability, particularly for screen elements at the edges. This proved especially to be a pain when writing SMSes. As seen in the picture, the letters "P", "L", "A" and the backspace buttons are rather close to the side, as a typical QWERTY keyboard would be. These are also buttons that are used fairly often, so I found it troublesome to type them. For example, when wanting to press "P", I found that I needed to press the space between "O" and "P" (and hopefully not press "O" mistakenly). Similarly, pressing the backspace button required pressing near the "L" button. Sometimes, I would even press "M" mistakenly, resulting in repeated "m"s when i wanted to delete a word.
Fortunately, scrolling is done with a flick of a finger across the screen, so I didn't have to worry about using a scrollbar.
On the other hand, typing on the keys in the centre of the screen was easy. I found that I could type almost as quickly as I could think of what I wanted to type and find the letter. For example, typing "the" was quickly done with quick, successive presses. The software lagged visibly when doing such fast typing, but it also remembered that I had typed those letters, so that I didn't find any missing letters in between.
One peeve about the keypad: it takes up more than half of the available screen space. That makes typing long messages (or email, if you're so inclined) to be irritating, because you can't see much of what you've typed before, requiring a lot of scrolling back and forth.
It doesn't help that there's no left-right-up-down buttons either. Instead, you navigate the text input by pressing with your finger -- and praying hard that you pressed at the correct spot! Very very hard, something I couldn't master even after 2 weeks.
Text entry - handwriting
It was only later that I realised that I could also type words by writing with my finger. The built-in handwriting recognition recognises both English and Chinese characters (and I think Japanese and Korean too). I had originally thought that the handwriting recognition could only be used with non-English characters. As I found out, writing letters big and clearly on the writing area resulted in a similarly painless method of entering text. Most of the time, though, the software would think that I was writing in non-English, especially when I wanted to write "l" (the lowercase "L").
Predictive text
In terms of predictive text, the software is able to recognise most English words easily (I didn't test with Chinese text predictions). However, like any touchscreen typing software, you must remember to take note of the word that the software has predicted before continuing. For example, when I wanted to write "I've", the predictive text would change it to "I'be", because writing the apostrophe requires using another text input screen that breaks the predictive text feature.
One aspect of predictive text that I found to be conspicuously absent was predicting the next word. For example, if I write "thank", my most likely next word would be "you" (thus "thank you"). The software does not provide any such prediction at all. So if you find yourself typing the same phrases again and again, be prepared for very tired fingers!
Google software
This being a Google Android phone, it worked like any other Google Android phone. You have Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar and YouTube built-in. With Google Maps, you can allow stalkers to find you through Google Latitude. YouTube videos can only be watched in landscape mode, i.e. turning the phone on its side.
The address book is synced with Google Contacts. As a Mac user, this means that in Address Book, you need to sync your contacts with Google (and I think also with Yahoo, in order for such online syncing to work), before your contacts can be synced with the Android-based phone. Thus, my method of importing my contacts was through the SIM card, which sacrificed a lot of other information that I keep handy, like postal addresses and email addresses.
(I believe that there is included software that works with Windows machines. Since I don't use Windows, I couldn't test it out. Not that it mattered anyway, since my review device came only with the phone, pouch and cables.)
Also, this being a Google device, search is prevalent and contextual. There is a dedicated physical search button at the bottom of the device. When viewing my contacts, pressing the search button would let me search my contacts only. When in text messages, it would search only my messages. And so on.
Based on my usage, it seemed like HTC didn't do much to add any extra value to the phone aside from what Google provided. E.g. there was no custom software, no custom apps, nothing that identified it as an HTC device that's different from other Android phones.
Camera
The only differentiating factor that I could find -- and this is debatable -- was the camera. This is a 3-megapixel camera with no flash. Under bright light (first picture), it works exceptionally well. But under low light conditions (second picture), it suffered due to poor autofocussing. It turns out that focussing was the real problem. Unlike most cameras, you don't see the usual focus box (that small white outline box in the centre of the screen) when composing your picture. The focus box only appears after you press the trackball (i.e. the shutter button)!
This seemed to me to be the opposite use of a focus box. Through repeated tries, there was no way to get the box to appear before taking a picture. With most cameras, pressing the shutter button halfway would result in the box appearing. With the HTC Magic, you could only press the trackball to take a picture.
Minor peeve: I'm not sure if the trackball is the correct component to use the shutter button. Since its a trackball that's meant for movement, I found my finger rolling off the ball when I wanted to press it to take a picture. Non-experienced users will find this irritating, especially if you're the type who would get someone else to take your group picture.
Conclusion
Overall, I wouldn't consider paying good money for this phone. I'm sure Google Android-based phones are a pleasure to use. But as a smartphone, there are certain basics that need to be done correctly. Like text entry. As long as the user has to worry constantly about typing the wrong letter just to compose a 140-character SMS, the text entry "feature" can be considered to be a gross failure. Which then makes this device a big pain to use regularly.
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