HTC makes Google phone with the Magician’s touch

LOADING Google Mail on to a phone can be like forcing toothpaste back into the tube. Both tasks are time consuming, frustrating and ultimately pointless.

That is unless you are using Australia’s second Google phone, the HTC Magic. Arriving in stores this week, it’s a much slicker handset than its predecessor, with a reactive touchscreen, a slim profile with no keyboard-related bulk, and an attractive, curved exterior that will slip unobtrusively into a pocket.

In fact, it’s a lot like a baby iPhone with a Google bent. And that Google angle gives users a large slice of the web with their mobile phone.

Loading Gmail, for instance, is exceedingly easy on this phone. You simply follow the prompts that ask for your login details, and your most recent email arrives on the screen in under five minutes.

The HTC Magic will then regularly alert you to incoming mail with the skill of a BlackBerry, while also importing your Google mail labels and letting you highlight favourite messages. It’s an efficient system, and one that could be a big selling point for any Gmail devotee.

The phone’s crisp, 3.2in touchscreen is used to run operations including text input in the absence of a physical keyboard. This is a reasonably effective system helped by text prediction and correction software. In fact, the on-screen keyboard is a lot like that of an iPhone, though users can enlarge it by tipping the phone on to its side to rotate the screen.

This touchscreen does get a little help from six tactile keys below the screen, including two call keys, and buttons to access the home screen, menus, go back one step and, in an unusual move, bring up a Google web search box.

Google Maps also comes preloaded in the HTC Magic, as does Google Talk for instant messaging, and an application to view YouTube clips. A text bar linking to Google’s search engine is also available on this phone’s home screen, so you won’t forget whose software runs this handset.

But there’s more to like about this phone than just its Google applications.

Bells and whistles

For starters, you can customise its home screen, and two extra screens on either side of it, with widgets and application icons. Hold your finger down on a vacant piece of screen and a menu will let you add shortcuts to applications, one of five available widgets, or change the wallpaper.

Applications include a web browser, a calendar, calculator, digital music player and, in the original HTC version, Quick Office and a PDF viewer.

A link to Google Android’s Market application store is also included, and is populated with plenty of free web apps and games.

The HTC Magic also features a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus that can take reasonably sharp photos, even indoors. The phone’s trackball, below the screen, acts as a shutter button and its photographic options can be accessed on-screen, including a digital zoom.

The camera can also record video and does so in landscape mode.

This is the only camera on this phone, however, as you don’t get a basic snapper on its face for easy video-calling.

Carrier availablility

Vodafone and 3 Mobile have announced they will offer the HTC Magic this month, but it’s worth noting that these offerings are different.

Not only does Vodafone offer an exclusive white edition of the phone, but the company has made some tweaks to its hardware.

Its version features a different 528MHz processor and less RAM (192MB instead of 288MB) in a change that Vodafone claims delivers better battery life.

The swap does make some processes a fraction slower, however, and in our tests the Vodafone version took a fraction longer to take a photo.

The Vodafone version also omits A2DP Bluetooth so you won’t be able to pair it with Bluetooth headphones.

Ultimately, though, both versions of HTC’s new Google phone are more sophisticated than their predecessor, intuitive to use, quick to operate and feature plenty to keep users occupied.

The HTC Magic is the best example of Google’s mobile phone vision to date and should find an appreciative audience when it launches this month.