24 hours with the HTC Magic Android phone

When I returned home tuesday I happily discovered that while I'd been away in Africa the HTC Magic had landed here in Denmark. Only at the 3 operator for the first few days but soon followed by TDC, Callme and Telmore. So yesterday I ran to the local 3 shop when it opened and they still had some HTC Magic phones in stock so I bought one right away! The first batch sold by 3 are not branded and they are supposedly not SIM locked either.

The phone itself is nicely proportioned and the build quality seems far better than my old SE 960i. Everything in the kit including the charger and sleeve pouch is white. The sleeve pouch and the headphones seems to be of a bit lesser build quility than the phone itself. The volume control on the headphones is positioned very close to the cable split which for me means that it is almost right below my chin and it's nearly impossible to see it. Also it doesn't use a standard mini jack connector which would have been nice. Thirdly I like the SE style plastic earpieces better than the ones supplied with the HTC Magic. Well enough bickering about the HW itself. Let's get to the Android SW.

To start out with I just played around with some of the supplied apps. The basic Mail app worked fine with my IMAPS mail account, though it only watches the inbox and I use Sieve to sort my mails to one of many subfolders, so the mail notifier is not really that useful. I tried k9mail instead and it's folder support seems better, but it doesn't support IMAP subfolders and it could be useful to have notifications for other folders than the Inbox.

The Browser works as expected, the only thing I really miss is some adblocking options. I tried browser based streaming TV from the national TV provider DR, but that didn't quite work.

The Music app have almost all features I'd like to use. Though cover download and lyrics support like Amarok would be nice:)

The Youtube app is also nice, though the "watch in high quality" option is a bit too well hidden. Playback of HQ music videos worked like a charm.

The Maps app and GPS is working great. I did a field test with it today while riding the train and it worked like a charm. Though it's a bit odd to sit in the train staring at a small flashing blue dot moving on the screen, like you always see in the movies:) I also used the Maps app to navigate the last few houndred meters on foot after disembarking the train. It would be nice though if the map could rotate according to which direction you were heading, like the Sky Map app.

Speaking of the Sky Map app this really rocks! Unfortunately it's been overcast here the last few days so I haven't had a chance to really compare it to the real thing. But just holding up the phone over your head and see the pictured night sky rotate as you rotate the phone is just awesome!

But the best app of them all must actually be the Market app. Not the app itself but the possibility to download countless apps free of charge! I've always loved to play around with the barcode scanners in various supermarkets so I quickly downloaded Barcode Scanner to play around with. So I used some time like a ten year old scanning all barcodes I could find:)

Next up was the ConnectBot to do my first SSH login using the HTC Magic. That felt nice too!

Eventhough there is no official FB app for the Android I tried one of the unoffical ones and it's reasonly useful to update status and keep track of your wall. It seems like several alternatives are being developed, so the situation will hopefully get better. But for now you can at least pretend you have a life on FB with the HTC Magic.

Today I've been toying a little with KDEPIM integration with Google Calendar and Contacts. I've previously used Gcaldaemon for synchronizing Korganizer calendar and Google Calendar, but it's not really a nice solution with a running Java daemon that tends to eat up all memory on the server. Instead I've tried out the Googledata Akonadi plugins that is demoed on Youtube. So far I've only experienced limited success. Creation of events in Korganizer seems to not be properly uploaded, but new events are downloaded to Korganizer (at least after a restart). For Kaddressbook I've tried moving contacts from the traditional Kaddressbook storage to the Akonadi plugin, but they fail to pop up in Google Contacts. I hope the state of KDEPIM Google integration will soon improve.

I think I got carried away while writing and it all got a bit longer than initially planned, but let's just say that after a bit over 24 hours I'm more than happy with my HTC Magic phone! The Android interface is very snappy and application switching is blazingly fast compared to my previous SE 960i. The onscreen "Cupcake" keyboard takes a bit of time getting used to and I haven't even had the time to try out the Camera and Camcorder yet. The only really bad thing about Google Android so far is that it is yet another way for Big Brother Google to gather tons of personal data. And now back to playing with the HTC Magic and let's see how long it goes before I have too root it:)