Gadget Maven Blog

There was a time when a touchscreen cellphone was an unsexy gadget, seen as  backward-thinking and hankering after those early personal digital assistants (PDAs) like the legendary Palm.

For years, I clung to my last Palm, swopping it only when Sony Ericsson’s P910i became sufficiently functional and when the idea of two stand-alone hand-helds was no longer practical. For a long time, it was only the Swedish-Japanese maker that made such touchscreens, still looked at as a kind of anomaly.

DISCLAIMER: This review was written before the SA distributors Leaf offered a competition, as discussed on ZA Tech Show episode 64.

BlackBerry’s Qwerty keyboard and those 12-keys of the average cellphone became the only interfaces with a cellphone that the average person wanted to use.

Then two-and-a-half years ago, something happened that made touchscreens sexy all over again. So sexy that every cellphone manufacturer had to have one. Immediately.

Whatever was life like prior to January 2007, or 0 BI (Before iPhone)?

Touchscreens never truly died out, but they were certainly in the minority, a forgotten technology. A forgotten interface when the accuracy of T9 predictive text and a five-way arrow key were top-dog in the thumb wars.

Now, led by the iPhone, touchscreens have been the must-have interface for the past two years at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Oscars and Rand Show of the cellular industry.

But very few touchscreen phones have rivalled Apple’s – in no small part because of the solid, almost unbreakable operating system that underpins it and it’s thoroughly brilliant internet access. It’s a superb iPod too, especially for video, but an average cellphone with crappy battery life. I haven’t tried Nokia’s thrilling new N97 yet and only briefly fiddled with Palm’s game-changing Pre, but Apple’s biggest competition has emerged – and not from another manufacturer but from an unexpected source and seeming ally against Microsoft: Google.

Last year Google launched the first of the so-called Gphones, handsets running the Android operating system it’s giving away to handset makers. This clever open source OS is a not-so-subtle ploy by Google to maintain the dominance it has on computers by shifting to mobiles, the fastest growing market segment for accessing the internet.

Google make no bones about it: they want you to use their server-based services, which live somewhere out there in “the cloud” (as the vast network of servers is called). Worrying about which device has which contact on it, or has synced with whatever email account is soooo old school, they reason. Why not have it all sitting in Gmail and just access it from any device, they argue. Hard to counter.

Now, the HTC Magic – the second generation handset from the Taiwanese manufacturer that is coincidentally Microsoft’ biggest partner in Windows Mobile handsets – has landed in South Africa. And what a device it is.

Clearly it’s benefitted from what’s been discovered with the first handset (and dispensed with its slide-out Qwerty keypad) and the whole experience is smooth and intuitive. It integrates with Google brilliantly, and after a few clicks to input my Gmail username and password and I was reading my mail (using Google’s superb mobile email app) and surfing almost effortlessly.

As you’d expect the online experience is superb.

The touchscreen is responsive and easy to use – and perhaps the phone’s only fault is that it isn’t multi-touch, that is, it can only identify one finger at a time. On-screen zoom in and out buttons solve that and it resizes web pages pretty well.

The virtual keyboard uses the built-in vibrating alert to buzz each time you hit a letter, so you feel like you’re pressed a key, and the predictive texting wasn’t bad at all.

Sold exclusively through Vodacom, the HSDPA phone comes with several data bundles which you’ll need if you’re going to use the Magic to it’s full, mobile internet-accessing potential.

For an old Palm-lover like me, it’s pleasing to see how right Palm was.

Key specs

• Camera: 3.2 megapixel, auto focus
• Display: 3.2-inch (8cm) TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen, 320×480 HVGA resolution
• Connectivity: HSDPA/WCDMA; Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g): Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP (Bluetooth stereo)
• GPS and Digital Compass
• Memory: microSD slot

More info

Read more specifications on the HTC site.

DISCLAIMER: This review was written before the SA distributors Leaf offered a competition, as discussed on ZA Tech Show episode 64.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.