This is my first Android related post. Thanks to the iPhone 3G S release last week, my mobile provider made a nice promotion to fight it. They sold the HTC Magic for 50% of it’s price. The stock for this promotion was about 200 units and they were sold out in 30 minutes. It wasn’t easy but I managed to buy one.

After a week using it, I have to say.. it’s just wonderful! The phone/android platform exceeded my expectations!

The phone has no pen (those pens to use on the screen) and you will not need one. I was astonished with the facility and by the fact that it worked perfectly with touch. If that wasn’t good enough the they added a trackball that let me say, it’s just perfect!

I didn’t put the battery in the cons. It holds up to 2/3 days of battery with normal use (sms, phone calls) but if you use the GPS it will drain the battery’s power allot faster.

About the cons, the Internet dependency is a con only if you don’t have a data plan. If that’s your case, you MUST have APNdroid! This app allows you to enable/disable the internet use but still has one problem… no mms get by, although this is the most requested feature and will be added soon.
I don’t use the camera that much but my old Nokia had flash so there is no excuse for the HTC Magic. The keybord.. the virtual keybord is very nice, I can use it very well and still I only have few days of experience, but for bigger tasks like for example connecting via ssh to a remote machine and solving a problem… well it might be challenging.

The first thing I tried was to get all the contacts out from my Nokia 5320 into the HTC Magic. I made a sync with outlook and made backups in pst and csv just in case. I had a hard time synchronizing the HTC Magic with outlook. First I tried windows 7 witch wasn’t a good idea, it lacks support for software and drivers. Then I tried to use a windows xp that I have in a virtual machine but still couldn’t do it. I ended up using my sisters laptop with windows vista and HTC Sync worked perfectly there.. although some of the contacts were messed up. I think the reason for this to happen is several syncs thru 4/5 mobile phones along the years (I had “invisible” contacts that I didn’t even know about). The prefect solution to sync the contacts was to import the csv file in gmail and then sync the phone with my gmail account. Worked like a charm and I have a backup of my contacts in my gmail account, witch I can access from anywhere.

I’m still testing the phone and it’s features but I can tell you, my next android related post will be with the “must have” apps. Stay tunned!