HTC Magic in Smartphones

So much anticipation, excitement and fervour surrounded its launch that, in hindsight, it was hardly surprising the first Google phone didn't quite come up to scratch. But it didn't do itself any favours: the G1 lacked the glamour the first Android phone ought to have had, and poor battery life sealed its fate.

More than six months after its first outing, Android at last has a phone to be proud of. The HTC Magic, this time peddled in an exclusive deal with Vodafone in the UK, may be the second Android phone but it's the first worth considering.

The main reason for this, but by no means the only one, is that it's a much sleeker, slimmer affair. It measures 113 x 56 x 14mm - around half a centimetre narrower and a few millimetres thicker than an iPhone - and slips in the pocket much easier than the G1.

It's not as beautifully engineered as Apple's finest, and annoyingly Vodafone has chosen only to make the phone available in white, but it does feel very well put-together and sits in the hand nicely.

The flipside to this smaller size is that there's no longer a hardware keyboard to make typing easy, but with Android version 1.5 on board (the so-called "Cupcake" update) there's now an on-screen keyboard for entering text. Here, you get a Qwerty keyboard that can be used in either portrait or landscape mode - thanks to the phone's built-in accelerometer it flicks between the two automatically - and it can be set to make an audible click, or vibrate when a key is pressed.

As with the iPhone it's not comfortable or accurate enough for writing long emails or memos, but after a bit of practise it's about as good as you'd expect of an onscreen keyboard. The new predictive text facility works well to help you correct mistakes too - you can mangle your words quite badly, even omitting punctuation such as apostrophes, and the list of suggestions usually comes up with what you originally meant to type.

Elsewhere the phone is a pleasure to use. Like the iPhone and G1 before it, the Magic has a capacitive touchscreen (3.2in in size, 320 x 480 in resolution), so the merest stroke of a finger is required to activate it.

Couple this with Android's delightfully straightforward mode of operation, and its excellent web browser and you have one easy to use handset.

In fact, you hardly need the hardware controls mounted on the chin of the phone. Four small buttons for Home, Menu, Back and Search facilities sit in a row above pick-up and hang-up keys and an oversized, clickable trackball, but we found ourselves using just the Menu and Back keys regularly.

The Android Market is also beginning to show its worth, and is now stuffed with all sorts of useful and entertaining applications ready for quick and easy download. One of the first we installed was GDocs - a tool for editing and viewing Google docs, essential in the absence of any kind of integrated synchronisation, but there's also everything here from a beta Microsoft Exchange synchronisation app (Roadsync) to games and other phone frippery. It's not the juggernaut that the iPhone App Store is, but it's a very encouraging start.

There are other improvements, too, such as the ability to record video clips and upload them easily to YouTube (don't expect great quality here, though) and the ability to play back video via the Gallery application. Converting video for the phone is simple - it plays back the same type of MP4 file as an iPod Touch or iPhone - and playback is smooth and glitch free.