Thoughts on HTC Magic Android Phone

I went to the Google I/O developer’s conference a few weeks ago and was one of many pleasantly surprised attendees to score a free HTC Magic with 30 days of voice and data (on T-Mobile’s “AWS 3G network”).  Prior to the happy unveiling of the conference gift, I’d only played with an Android powered device for a few minutes, not counting the simulator.  The device was unimpressive at first – not very responsive and kind of difficult to navigate around.  In hind-sight, I wonder if it was doing a bunch of background work getting everything synced with my Google account and what-not and getting things generally configured.  I wonder this because now, weeks later, it’s very responsive and generally very smooth.  Maybe my expectations have changed a bit, but I really think something else was going on.

So, now, two weeks later, I really like the device.  I’m a big BlackBerry fan, but I would definitely use this device instead of a BlackBerry for personal use (for business use, the BES just can’t be beat, but that’s not a fair comparison).  Here’s what I’m really enjoying:

• The camera’s integration points are smoooooth.  This is thanks to the way Android allows applications to integrate.  I truly love taking a picture, reviewing that picture, clicking “share” and being able to choose to email it to people via GMail, post to my Picasa account, tweet it, publish in a blog, send as picture message, or whatever else my heart desires.  It’s great, smooth, and super damn easy.  And hooray for the environment, I love that I could build an app to integrate with that, just as smoothly as all of those.
• Google Voice is a first-class citizen.  I have no idea how this was implemented, since there isn’t a public API, but there is a Google Voice app that mega-rules and lets me do everything via Google Voice.  I selected to make all outgoing calls via Google Voice, so go into contacts, hit dial and bam, Google Voice dials out. Incoming GV calls are smooth, voicemails are sent to the notification tray, etc.  The app is open-sourced, so if I ever get un-lazy I’ll download the source and figure out the magic.  Maybe it’s just screen scraping/controlling the GV server in the background, which would be an interesting approach.
• Speaking of the notification tray, it’s awesome.  And again, woot for integration because any app can write to the notification tray.  Which means I get notifications that I’ve got new tweets, new emails from all accounts, calendar entries, google voice messages, and so on.

In general, it’s a great device.  Voice quality has been great, the 3G network has been great and it smoothly transitions to wireless when I’ve got a network setup.  I also bought an app for my daughter that shows pictures of animals and plays a sound for each one and she absolutely loves it.  Now to figure out how to get it working on my AT&T network.  Yikes.