The iPhone 3G had the polish, the HTC G1 had the keyboard. The HTC Magic tries to land in the middle – a cleaner, friendlier full-touch Android phone that finally looks ready for mainstream buyers.
Compared to the boxy, hardware-keyboard-heavy G1 (a.k.a. HTC Dream), the Magic is lighter, slimmer and clearly aimed at people who wanted an iPhone-style slab but with Google’s new OS. It doesn’t blow past Apple’s hardware, and it doesn’t fix every early-Android annoyance, but it’s a much more convincing pitch for the platform.
Design: From G1 Tank to Pocket-Friendly Slab
The G1 was unapologetically chunky. The HTC Magic goes the opposite way: 113 x 55 x 13.7 mm, 118.5 g, curvy, and far less aggressive in the pocket. It’s not the smallest full-touch phone of its time, but it’s in the sweet spot where you stop thinking about the size at all.
The big shift is aesthetic. In pearl white gloss, the Magic actually looks like a consumer product rather than a developer dev kit. The plastic is surprisingly fingerprint‑resistant and the build feels durable, even if a bit of metal would have given it a more premium heft. A black version exists if you want something more discreet, but white is the statement option.
Most of the front is a 3.2″ HVGA (320 x 480) capacitive TFT at 65K colors. On paper that color depth looks dated, and you can see gradients break up in rare cases, but contrast and brightness are solid. Sunlight legibility is impressive; colors stay readable outdoors, though the panel reflects more than an iPhone 3G, sometimes throwing a rainbow across the glass.
Below the display, HTC kept one foot in the old-school smartphone world: a trackball plus six hardware keys (Home, Back, Menu, Search, Send, End). They’re small with short travel, so big-handed users will occasionally fumble, but they’re responsive. The End key doubles as screen-off/lock, and unlocking relies on the Menu key.
The trackball itself is a highlight. For scrolling through lists or nudging a cursor, it’s as intuitive as the BlackBerry-style balls it clearly copies, though there’s no speed adjustment. In camera mode it doubles as zoom and shutter. Zoom is fine; shutter is less ideal since there’s no half-press for focus.
On the sides, you just get a slim volume rocker. The top is empty. The bottom hosts a miniUSB port, which handles data, charging and audio – there’s no 3.5mm jack and no miniUSB-to-3.5mm adapter in the box. That move is going to age badly.
Around back, you’ve got a 3 MP autofocus camera (no flash) and a loudspeaker behind a shared grill at the top of a brushed metal plate. Under the cover: a 1340 mAh Li‑Ion battery and hot‑swap microSD slot. The Magic happily takes 16GB cards, which matters given how app and media‑hungry Android already is.
Android 1.5 Cupcake: Early, But Finally Feels Like a Platform
Under the glass, the Magic runs Android 1.5 (Cupcake), which is basically Android 1.0 with key fixes and a softer UI. If you lived through the G1, nothing is unrecognizable, but it feels more like an OS regular users could live with.
The headline upgrade is the on‑screen keyboard. The Magic has no hardware QWERTY, and Cupcake’s virtual keyboard works in portrait and landscape. Button size is decent, but edge keys sometimes miss taps and mis‑presses are still a thing. Prediction and spell‑checking help a lot, though, and for most people this will be good enough for SMS and email. Hardcore typists will still miss the G1 shortcuts – you can’t hit Search + B to jump to the browser when there’s no B key.
The homescreen sticks to the original Android concept: three panels with a mix of shortcuts, folders and widgets instead of the widget‑only approach others tried. Cupcake adds Live folders, which auto‑populate with dynamic content like “Contacts with phone numbers” or “Starred contacts.” The idea is powerful – imagine live RSS or location‑based lists – but out of the box it’s underused and easy for casual users to overlook.
Widgets get two new members: calendar and music player. Both are functional, but limited. The calendar widget only shows upcoming events; no mini monthly view like Samsung’s TouchWiz widgets. And unlike some competing UIs, widgets here don’t expand when tapped; if your homescreens are full, you just hit “No more room” instead of getting smarter layouts.
Android’s notification system is already one of its strongest features. The drop‑down shade at the top shows status icons and, once pulled down, the full list of recent events. Tap to jump into an app or clear it and move on. The experience is quietly better than many contemporaries that used intrusive pop‑ups.
Cupcake’s app model is still unusual: there’s no hard line between “running” and “closed.” The system juggles background tasks and kills things when it needs RAM, restoring them to previous state when you come back. On the Magic, that behavior works acceptably well, especially on the 288 MB RAM variant the review covered. There’s also a basic recent‑apps “task switcher” with the last six items.
Security gets a modern touch with gesture unlock. Instead of a PIN, you draw a pattern across a 3×3 grid of dots. You can enable haptics and even hide the visible pattern trail. It doesn’t yet support pattern‑to‑app shortcuts, but for 1.5 it’s a flexible lock method.
Core Phone and Messaging: Capable, With Some Rough Edges
The contacts app is surprisingly deep for such an early build. Each entry can store multiple numbers with custom labels, emails, IM nicknames, postal addresses, company and title info, notes, and custom ringtones. You can also redirect a specific contact straight to voicemail, which is genuinely useful.
Detail views are broken into clear sections with dedicated tabs for calling, SMS/MMS and email. Large row targets make it very thumb‑friendly. Starring a contact flags it as a favorite and syncs with Gmail’s “Starred in Android” group. Photo assignment is straightforward, and those photos double as icons if you drop contact shortcuts on the homescreen.
Search is instant: hit the hardware Search key in the phonebook and type. Audio during calls is decent but on the quiet side at max volume. Reception is strong even though the signal bar under‑reports strength a bit.
The dialer is now a separate app with an on‑screen keypad, contact list and smart dialing. The call log merges incoming, outgoing and missed calls into one view. One nice but divisive touch: the phone vibrates when a call connects. Great if the phone’s in your hand; annoying if it’s at your ear, and there’s no proximity‑based logic or even a manual toggle.
Speaker‑independent voice dialing exists in some markets, but not all. The review unit didn’t have it, and user reports suggest patchy regional availability.
On the messaging side, the Magic does SMS, MMS, email and Google Talk. SMS/MMS are threaded, iPhone‑style, with the latest message at the bottom. The compose box, even with the keyboard hidden, only uses a small area of the screen, which makes longer messages feel cramped. Incoming messages show as a tiny icon in the status bar; the notification shade reveals the sender and snippet or just a count if there are multiple threads.
Draft handling is smart: any un‑sent text in a thread stays in the compose box even if you exit without explicitly saving. Individual messages have long‑press options for edit, delete, forward, and copy. SMS automatically converts to MMS when you attach media.
Gmail and the generic mail client see small but meaningful improvements. Gmail gets batch operations for archive, label or delete, plus faster scrolling and cleaner icons. The standard mail client loses its tree view in favor of a top‑level inbox that can sort by date, subject, sender or size, and adds previous/next shortcuts when you’re inside a message.
Media: Better Than G1, Still Not a Multimedia Powerhouse
Cupcake finally brings video recording and a basic video player to Android, and the Magic benefits directly from that. Videos live inside the Gallery rather than a separate app. The Gallery auto‑scans images and videos from any folder and groups them into sub‑galleries named after folders, complete with thumbnail previews.
Navigation is smooth and fast after initial caching, even with large folders. You can start the camera or camcorder straight from the Gallery. What you still can’t do is multi‑select photos for batch operations; if you’re cleaning up a big library, it’s tedious.
Image viewing gets a better zoom system: double‑tap jumps directly to 100% at the exact point you tap, and step‑based zoom is more usable. There’s also an in‑app crop shortcut.
The built‑in video player is extremely basic: play/pause and scrub, no extra controls. Codec support is limited to 3GP and MPEG‑4, so most users will be transcoding content. For people coming from Nokia’s Symbian devices with broader codec support, this is a step down.
The music player UI gets refreshed icons and a minimal widget, but functionality barely moves. There’s still no EQ, no visualizations, and audio goes through miniUSB-only unless you buy an adapter. Two usability boosts: a new alphabetical slider on the right for quickly jumping through long track lists, and a long‑press search option that lets you look up the current song directly in YouTube or Google. Search results open right into the YouTube client, which is genuinely handy.
Audio quality is “fine for most,” not for purists. Frequency response shows cut‑off bass, likely due to a high‑pass filter tuned for tiny bundled earbuds. Noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk are strong, but distortion is notably higher than an iPhone 3GS. If you care about clean output and lossless audio, this isn’t your dream player.
Camera and Video: Respectable 3 MP, Late to Video
The Magic’s 3 MP autofocus camera (2048 x 1536) arrives with no flash, so low‑light is essentially off the menu. However, compared to the G1, image processing has been noticeably tuned.
The new camera interface is a big step up from the early, iPhone‑simple UI of Android 1.0. By default you get a clean viewfinder with no overlays. Tap the screen and a zoom bar appears on the left with a shortcut to the Gallery on the right. Hit Menu and you unlock more settings: capture mode (photo/video), resolution, white balance, exposure, self‑timer and an advanced menu for metering, sharpness, saturation, contrast and optional gridlines.
Strangely, geo‑tagging is gone even though the G1 had it. That’s a regression that doesn’t make a lot of sense in a GPS‑equipped, Google‑centric phone.
Image quality is solid for 3 MP. Colors are pleasing, noise reduction is better judged than on the G1, and there’s no harsh oversharpening or obvious purple fringing. Dynamic range is improved. Resolution chart tests put it on par with the iPhone 3GS in resolved detail, while actually producing cleaner, less noisy output and a better‑handled grayscale.
Video recording finally arrives in Android via Cupcake, but resolution tops out at CIF. You can pick MP4 or 3GP (H.263) encoding, but at such a low resolution the practical difference is small. Still, coming from “no video at all” on the G1, this is progress.
Browser, Apps and GPS: Web First, Everything Else Follows
Connectivity is strong on paper: quad‑band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, dual‑band 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA, plus Wi‑Fi. Wi‑Fi setup is intentionally simple: pick a network, enter a password, connect. USB mass storage is present, but only for the microSD card; to mount, you have to plug in, then explicitly choose “mount” from the notification shade.
Bluetooth is the weak link. It’s restricted to headset use and A2DP; file transfer is off the table for now, very much echoing iPhone‑style limits.
The browser is WebKit‑based, like Chrome and Safari, and it feels fast for its era. Pages render quickly; kinetic scrolling on the capacitive screen is smooth. There’s no native pinch‑to‑zoom unless you tweak the software, so you rely on plus/minus onscreen buttons or double‑tap. A movable “magnifier” rectangle appears when fully zoomed out to help read fine text, but it disappears once you lift your finger.
Multiple tabs (called “windows”) are supported, with a simple thumbnail switcher. The real gap is Flash: there’s a dedicated YouTube app, but wider Flash content is inaccessible in‑browser. HTC’s later Hero touts Flash as a major upgrade over the Magic.
Office document and PDF viewing finally arrive through Quickoffice and a PDF viewer. You can open attachments or files from storage, though editing isn’t supported yet, and non‑image attachments can’t be saved locally. Attaching arbitrary files to outgoing mail is possible.
The calendar is flexible with agenda, day, week, month and “today” views, and event creation is straightforward with alarm options. A basic but touch‑friendly calculator is baked in. There’s no preloaded voice recorder, but grabbing a free one from Android Market takes under a minute and even lets you send recordings immediately.
The alarm clock is surprisingly capable, supporting multiple alarms with custom times and repeat patterns. The YouTube client helps soften the blow of no browser Flash, delivering quick access and direct integration with the music player’s “search on YouTube” option.
GPS lock from cold start takes a couple of minutes, which is slow, but subsequent locks are faster. Google Maps is the only built‑in navigation app, with Street View and digital compass support. Street View plus compass actually feels futuristic – rotate the phone and the 360° photo rotates with you for a pseudo‑VR look.
Turn‑by‑turn voice navigation isn’t built in, but the free AndNav2 app can layer turn‑by‑turn directions and text‑to‑speech guidance on top of Google Maps. The TTS voice is very synthetic, but for early Android it’s a functional workaround.
Android Market and Modding: Hinting at the Future
Preinstalled apps are minimal: Google Maps, Google Talk, Quickoffice, a PDF viewer and YouTube. Everything else, including games, lives in Android Market – which, unsurprisingly, mirrors the logic and structure of Apple’s App Store.
App discovery is already manageable thanks to growing categories and search. Downloads show a status bar in the notification area, and once complete you can launch straight from there. Permissions are surfaced clearly before install, listing data or settings the app can access so you can bail if something looks sketchy.
The Magic only ships with one built‑in game (Teeter), but Market fills in the gaps quickly with both trivial and genuinely useful apps. Given Android’s open nature, that catalog is expected to grow far faster than any vendor‑controlled ecosystem.
For tinkerers, the Magic is almost a blank canvas. Android’s open‑source roots are already attracting custom ROMs. One of the biggest carrots is HTC’s own Sense UI from the Hero, which can be unofficially ported to the Magic. If you flash a Hero ROM, you not only get Sense’s more mature interface, but also enable multi‑touch on hardware that technically supports it.
There are caveats: the Magic exists in 192 MB and 288 MB RAM variants, whereas the Hero has 288 MB. Running Sense on the lower‑RAM Magic can feel slow, and early ROMs inevitably have bugs. Anyone tempted is pointed to the xda‑developers forums, but flashing is a “do this at your own risk” situation, especially on a new, not‑cheap phone.
Against the Competition: A Promising, Imperfect Step
Stacked against its peers, the Magic sits in an awkward but interesting spot. The iPhone 3G is pricier, has cleaner multimedia, smoother graphics and a far more mature app store, but Android offers openness and the promise of dozens of manufacturers behind it instead of one. For someone chasing the best pure touch experience today, Apple still has an edge, but the Magic makes Android’s trade‑offs more palatable.
On the other side, Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic is cheaper and backed by Symbian’s long history and huge software library, but its interface feels clunkier and less visually appealing than the Magic’s lighter, more modern Android skin. If you value UI fluidity over legacy features, the Magic pushes back hard.
Windows Mobile’s HTC Touch Diamond2 is arguably the strongest technical rival: more features, better office integration, smoother handling than old WinMo stereotypes suggest, and massive app support. It’s also in roughly the same price band. The Magic’s main argument there is future potential – Android will get faster, prettier and more fully featured, and the Magic could age well as the ecosystem and ROM scene develop.
Taken on its own, the HTC Magic is a clear improvement over the G1. It drops the geeky keyboard brick vibe for a mass‑market full‑touch design, fixes glaring omissions like video and document viewing, and sprinkles smart OS tweaks on top. Battery life is decent, the screen is genuinely good, and the whole device feels much closer to what people expected from Android’s first wave.
It doesn’t solve everything – Bluetooth is crippled, media support is thin, the camera lacks a flash and video recording is low‑res – but as a second‑gen Android device it shows the platform moving fast. If prices slide as newer models arrive, the Magic has all the ingredients to turn into a very strong value buy.
For now, it’s a cautiously promising sign that Android isn’t just a one‑off experiment. Google and HTC are listening, iterating and edging toward phones that can genuinely challenge the incumbents.
Stay tuned to IntoDroid for more Android updates.