HTC Magic hands-on preview

As a preview for the phone’s launch this Friday, we got to have a detailed look at HTC’s new Magic Android handset, which will be a Vodafone exclusive. It only comes in white, although it looks sleek thanks to its slim body and tasteful curves.

If you’ve tried out the T-Mobile G1, you’ll be familiar with the Magic’s interface but, if not, it’s comprised of three main home screens that you can populate freely with applications, games, widgets and shortcuts to your favourite contacts. Of course, since you have the freedom to do what you want, you could fill it with the contact details of borderline strangers if you fancy, but what’s the point in that?

Underneath the home screen lies an arrow-adorned tab. Clicking on this brings up the main applications menu from which you can pull additional games and applications onto any of the three home screens. Widgets are placed simply by holding a finger on the home screen and navigating through the menu that pops up. Pre-installed ones included the music player, calendar, photo frame and clock, but you’ll be able to download others too.

More specific to this particular device are its navigation features. Typically Google-centric for an Android device, it has a button just under the right hand-side of the screen that takes you to the Google Internet search bar. Rather than having a D-pad style controller below the screen, the HTC Magic opts for a scroll ball. Although it feels like a trackball, it appears to simply work in four directions. Even when surfing the web, it selects links and other selectable objects directly rather than acting as a cursor controller.

It was, however, comfortable to use and very responsive as we navigated through the phone’s menus, Internet sites and the Android marketplace. The accelerometer was responsive too, sensing whether the phone was being held horizontally or vertically at a rate to compete with the iPhone.

The ease of use is complemented well by the phone’s elegant, pocket-able stature. Its sleekness is paid for by the fact that it doesn’t include a QWERTY keyboard, most notably offered by the rival G1 Android handset. The touchscreen does make up for this to an extent, being responsive and highly usable.

Indeed, ease of use seems to be the order of the day with the HTC Magic. Even though the marketplace offers endless scope for clogging your phone up with almost as many weird, wonderful and useless bits of software as the App Store, actually navigating between the menus and setting up your home screen is simple.

The on-board camera was a little less impressive, mind. Although we have yet to see the results it produces, the refresh rate on the preview screen didn’t compare favourably with most of the phones tested in our cameraphone head-to-head. It may be a little unfair to put such camera-centric devices up against the HTC Magic’s relatively paltry 3.2-megapixel offering though. The Magic also lacks a dedicated physical button to take photos, relying on a press of the scroll ball or touchscreen. It’s one more sacrifice for the sake of uninterrupted curves.

Equally, the microSD slot, currently only tested for up to 8GB cards (but may well support higher capacity micro SHDC cards too) lives underneath the phone’s back-plate. Cards are still hot-swappable, but makes changing cards that little bit more fiddly. The HTC Magic comes with a 2GB card as standard, and with 512MB onboard memory.

There are currently no plans to release any other colours of the device in the UK, although the Italian market has a black version on offer. The HTC Magic will be available for free on a £35 per month contract, which includes unlimited data and texts plus 600 minutes, from Friday.