Announced in February 2009, HTC Magic hit the shelves three months later, in May 2009. The device is available in two classical colors: black and white. HTC Magic can be bought for around 450 USD, but that depends on location and plan. I suggest buying the unlocked version, so you can get the new graphical user interface that has been included with the Hero model.

Design

If you think HTC Magic looks more like the first smartphone to feature the Android operating system, HTC Dream (G1), you are so wrong. It seems that HTC accustomed its fans with new looks for every new device launched, which doesn’t look too much like the previous models. That wasn’t the case two-three years ago, but lately HTC has been in for nice surprises in terms of design.

HTC Magic looks more stylish than its “elder” brother G2. There’s definitely some resemblance between the two, but it is almost negligible. Only the small, white trackball and the curved form factor have been embedded into the new G2 model that could make it look like the G1. The rest is completely new and radiates style and freshness. Even though the material used is a polished plastic that is a fingerprint magnet, you won’t be bothered by it, as the front part of the phone is seized by the impressive touchscreen. The only thing I was really bothered by was the quantity of grease left on the display after every call or use of the screen. The phone is surrounded by a silver-colored plastic band, which, in my opinion, will peel off after some time of use.

Under the 3.2-inch display, there are four squared keys with various functions: the Home key, Menu key, Back key, and Search key. Of course, the Accept and Reject calls have also been included right under the above-mentioned keys. The trackball that makes menu browsing so easy has been placed in the middle of these keys and works like a charm. There are no other external keys placed on the sides of the smarpthone, except for the long, thin volume key. There’s also a miniUSB port that can be used for headphones, cable synchronization or for the charger, placed on the bottom side of the device. The back hood of the phone is shiny and covers the SIM and microSD memory slots. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that the shiny plastic on the back will also peel off and will become frosted. Anyway, that should keep the fingerprints away, so there’s also a good part to it.

The 3.2-Megapixel camera on the back has been placed a little bit within the back cover and surrounded by a thin metallic band for protection reasons. There are no other adds around it, like flash or mirror for self-portraits. The back cover can be easily pulled out in case users will want to add a microSD memory card or simply change the SIM card.

Display and Camera

HTC Magic features a 3.2-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen that supports 65K colors and a 320×480-pixel resolution. It seems to me that this is the same display that G1 has been gifted with. Unfortunately, I have noticed that the screen is not that visible in strong sunlight, thus control will be a little bit difficult. Otherwise, thanks to the technology embedded, it eliminates the need for a stylus and makes your own finger the only way you can control your device on the screen. As the screen has been covered with a material (indium tin oxide), which is said to conduct a continuous electrical current across the sensor, both the sensor and the human body (your finger) are able to achieve capacitance and are good electricity conductors. Knowing that capacitive sensors are working based on proximity and don’t need to be directly touched to be triggered, we can now understand why it’s so easy to control a device that has this piece of technology embedded in it.

Unfortunately, HTC Magic, like its “elder” brother, is not capable of recognizing multi-touch gestures. The same goes for the accelerometer, which has been implemented to some degree, though is only restricted to some applications. Anyway, the image quality is flawless, and the change between landscape and portrait mode is smooth. Everything you do seems effortlessly natural when using the touchscreen: touching, dragging, or moving. This proves again that the technology that stands behind these capacitive touchscreens is superior to that of resistive displays.

The 3.2-Megapixel camera lacks a flash, which eliminates the possibility of taking pictures at night, but at least users get the auto-focus feature. Comparing pictures made with HTC G1 and Magic, there’s definitely an improvement. HTC Magic takes more than decent pictures for a 3-Megapixel module camera. The maximum resolution that can be used is of 2048×1536 pixels. The camera interface is a little bit more complex than G1’s and now benefits from a wide range of settings and options. Users will be able to change Effects, Contrast, Sharpness, and White balance.

Menu and Software

HTC Magic runs the same operating system called Android, as its G1 predecessor. Still, unlike the G1, HTC Magic features an updated version of the Android operating system, which is also called Cupcake 1.5. Basically, it’s the same OS, but with some tweaks. If you previously owned the G1, you won’t notice the difference at first glance.

Magic comes with the same pre-installed applications that are mostly Google-dedicated. This means that they’re providing access to a few Google services such as GMail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and Google Talk. You won’t be able to access the Android Market until you register with a GMail account, and this is available even if your device is unlocked. After that, the device will simply synchronize with your GMail account, so you can access your emails at any given time you want. The Google Maps application supports map, satellite, traffic, and street view. The latter functions well, and the digital compass is coupled with the accelerometer to align the view on the screen with the actual orientation of the phone.

There are three available Homescreens for Magic that can be used for various purposes. All three can be added with shortcuts to anything available within the phone: contacts, applications, and games. If you drag the main screen to the left, you’ll notice the Google Search service, while dragging it to the right will take you to a clean screen that can be customized and filled with various shortcuts or widgets. This is possible by keeping your finger pressed on the screen until a sub-menu appears displaying various choices.

Communication

HTC Magic is fully packed with connectivity technologies such as: GPRS and EDGE class 10, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2 Mbps. As you can see from the tests below, the device reached speeds of up to 187.5 Kbit/s download and 41.8 Kbit/s on EDGE and 1136.7 Kbit/s download and 342.6 Kbit/s upload on the Orange 3G network. These performances are almost double than what G1 could achieve.

The integrated web-browser called WebKit reminds of Safari and Chrome browsers and looks and behaves impressively. It displays pretty much any Internet page, no matter how loaded with images it is. The only thing that lacks is the Flash. Otherwise, you will be able to zoom in/out, drag, move, or open numerous windows that can be closed after you’re done with the page.

Another connectivity feature included is Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP support, but only as a headset support. You don’t have the possibility to transfer files over the Bluetooth connectivity, as the platform lacks the OBEX protocol. This is another serious drawback of the smartphone, but it will probably be corrected in future firmware updates.

HTC Magic is compatible with all email clients and protocols (POP3, IMAP) and can also be synchronzied with Microsoft Exchange. The rest of the email accounts can be set to be checked at various intervals (five, ten, 30 minutes). The device is also compatible with SMS, EMS, and MMS text features. Instant-messaging options include Google Talk, but other Ims can be also installed. The interface is pretty straightforward and user-friendly. The Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g connectivity is another option that will surely reduce costs for those that are heavily using Internet browsing or data transfers. The built-in GPS receiver and digital compass work together with the Google Maps, so that you won’t get lost.

Processor and Memory

HTC Magic is powered by a single Qualcomm MSM7201A ARM11 family processor, running at speeds of up to 528 Mhz. The MSM7201A is a dual-core CPU/GPU, and contains many built-in features including 3G and a GPU capable of up to four million triangles/sec. It has hardware acceleration for Java, but this does not accelerate the execution of Android applications, as they are targeted to the Dalvik VM, not the Java VM. Overall, I haven’t experienced any lock-downs, crashes, or lags.

Multimedia

HTC Magic features an MP3 player that can also be used as a widget from the Homescreen. Unfortunately, not much has changed since G1 was launched, so I was a little bit disappointed. Even though the new MP3 player has a new look with new icons, you are still unable to use any kind of equalizers or visualization effects. Moreover, the phone doesn’t feature a 3.5mm jack port or at least an adapter for the miniUSB port. The smartphone supports audio files in MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, MPEG4, WAV, MIDI, Real Audio, and Ogg formats. There’s one positive thing I discovered and that was the movie player integrated, which was missing in the previous G1 model. You will be able to play only 3gp and MPEG4. Overall, I found that the music sound was average in quality, but I hope that future Android devices will improve that.

Battery

HTC Magic has a better battery than G1 – 1340 mAh Li-Ion, which has an officially stated life expectancy of 420 hours in standby, and of about seven hours and 30 minutes in talk-time mode. Our test unit made it for about two days at a medium use. Heavy users will need daily charging, or four-five charges per week. The autonomy is acceptable only for a medium use, but will require almost daily employment for heavy users, especially those that are resorting to all of the Magic’s features (messaging, Internet browsing, movie, and music playback).

Impressions

The second Android device coming from HTC is looking much better and the software improvements are more than welcome. Using it was a very nice experience, which means that HTC did a great job again. I strongly recommend the Magic to those that didn’t have the chance to get the G1 last year. The last Android phones coming from HTC, Magic and Hero, have great potential on the market, but I’m sure that the Taiwanese manufacturer will surprise us pretty soon with more and better Android devices.

The Good

Besides the fact that Android performs as one of the best operating systems for mobile platforms, especially in terms of speed and stability, I would also like to mention the stylish design of the device and the improvements that have been made to the camera. HTC Magic has a good value for money, which can be a real threat for iPhone’s sales, especially given that HTC fans have more devices to choose from.

The Bad

There are still some basic features that the Android misses at the moment, such as: the Flash for the integrated browser, the compatibility with multi-gestures and Bluetooth data transfers. Besides that, I think a better autonomy of the battery would’ve been great, even though its capacity has been improved since the first Android device.

Sales Package

HTC Magic handset;
2GB microSD Card;
1340 mAh Li-Ion Battery;
Charger;
USB Cable;
Leather case.

Chrome OS is designed to run on standard x86 PC hardware, as well as ARM chips and the ever popular Intel Atom used in the majority of netbooks. It’s going to be based on a Linux kernel and according to Sundar Picha, the Google Engineering director who broke the news on his blog, key user-inspired features will include near-instant startup and email download no waiting for the whole OS to boot — no slowdown in performance, simplified configuration, freedom from constant updates, Google’s current crop of web-based applications will be heavily featured and needless to say, it will be free. There’s bound to be the odd catch and hiccup along the way but at this early stage it sounds very promising indeed; more news when we have it.

“We are excited to discuss what we’ve learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential,” the official Google blog reads.

Google identified a number of ways to improve the current conditions, for example updating the standards that power the web like HTML and TCP/IP, and the company promotes the HTML 5 proposed standard, which brings some technologies for optimizing speed. Another big focus, the Google engineers believe, should be on further improving JavaScript, on which many resource-hungry web apps rely, performance that has already seen a 100x increase in the past years.

Another recommendation is the use of tools for optimizing websites like Yahoo!’s YSlow and Google’s own, recently launched, Page Speed, both of which can identify problems that are slowing down the pages. The last one, increasing broadband coverage, is a no-brainer, and the company believes further steps should be taken to ensure that more people have access to a broadband connection.

The company has been doing its part, of course, keeping the design of its search page and many other products as minimalistic as possible, optimizing its code and even releasing its own browser Chrome, which has a big focus on speed. The new site providing tools and information to web developers is another step it is taking in ensuring that the web of tomorrow will be significantly faster than today.

“Today I’m excited to announce that we’re rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we’ve brought online. We’ve also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites,” wrote Brandon Badger, product manager for Google Books.

The most important new feature is a much simpler way of embedding the books on other websites. The Mountain View-based company now provides a small code snippet that should make sharing a book just as easy as sharing a YouTube video. Embedding was possible before but it involved using the Embedded Viewer API and a fair share of knowledge. In addition to embedding, Google Books now also offers a URL link so you can share any page from a book with your friends via email or IM.

The search inside books has been upgraded too, with keywords now highlighted and displayed in context with the snippet of text surrounding them. The results are now sorted by relevance also not just by page number, making it easier to find what you are looking for.

Navigating the books is simpler with two new tools, a “Thumbnail View,” which shows an overview of the pages from a public domain book or magazine, and a “Contents drop-down menu,” which lets users jump to the book chapters or magazine article they desire. The other new features are Plain Text Mode, which displays an HTML version of public domain books, Page Turn Button and Animation and an Improved Book Overview Page.

The amount of online data is increasing exponentially and everyone trying to keep track of it is having a harder time doing so. Even Google isn’t having it any easier and it has acknowledged that the current keyword-based search won’t be able to keep up for long. Adding structure to the data online, using it more like a database, would make it much easier to manage the volume of information. This is what the search giant hopes to do with its Google Squared project.

Having the web all organized, labeled and structured is what many companies are trying to do for the search engines of tomorrow. A recent popular example in this regard is the recently launched Wolfram Alpha, which works differently from most search engines, including Google’s, because instead of just indexing the data on the web it gathers it and stores it in its internal databases. It then analyzes it to provide the results for users. While many were first hailing it as the Google-killer, in reality it’s too different from the latter to be a direct competitor. Even so, the Mountain View-based company isn’t taking any chances and it’s come up with its own structured search engine, Google Squared.

First announced at the Google I/O Developer Conference last month, Google Squared is the company’s answer to structured search and just went live at Google Labs for anyone to test. It shares features with Microsoft’s new search engine Bing in that it has topical search results spread by categories but it is in fact much more like Wolfram Alpha. Like it, Google Squared’s results give users facts and data on a query and not just links to web pages. But the main difference is that, unlike Wolfram Alpha, it doesn’t store the information in an internal database and doesn’t analyze it either. It just structures the data already available online.

The name comes from the way results are presented to users, in squares, much like a spreadsheet. Searching something like ‘Porsche 911′ will give you a list of current and past Porsche models, although not necessarily 911s, and columns with information associated to each model like an image, a short description and some stats – not exactly perfect but much faster than getting all the info from different sources using multiple searches. You can remove items you don’t need and you can also add columns and items with other information that you might find useful and it will automatically retrieve that info as well. Google Squared is in a very early stage of development so some searches might prove more useful than others but it’s bound to get better in time and, in fact, the columns and items you add or remove will help the search engine give a better answer next time.

In China, the most popular search engine is not the leader of the market, but trails behind giant Baidu.com Inc., which has the most visitors and registered searches per day. The President of Google for greater China, Lee Kai-Fu, said that one of the main reasons why the company lagged behind Baidu was the fact that Google offered no music downloads. “We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads. We were missing one piece – we didn’t have music,” Lee stated.

Thus far, approximately 350,000 songs have been made available for download, but plans are to extend that number until it reaches 1.1 million. Artists from both the Chinese and the international scene will be available, and Google is relying on www.Top100.cn to host and distribute the music.

The Chinese site has been reportedly co-founded by Chinese basketball star Yao Ming. “This is the first serious attempt to start [monetizing] the online market in China. I can’t overestimate how important this is,” the President of Warner Music Asia Pacific and Asia Chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), Lachie Rutherford, shared.

The measure has been absolutely necessary, music industry representatives say, simply because some 99 percent of the country’s market circulates pirated materials. The remaining one percent is valued at $76 million, a very small sum considering the real worth of the market. With these numbers, the largest country in the world only accounts for about one percent of the worldwide market, a statistic that simply does not reflect the reality.

The main idea behind Google’s cooperation with the four companies is to deflect users from downloading or listening to music on pirated websites, and to turn them to the “bright side,” on the official ones. The corporations rely on the fact that their services are much better than any others, and hope that Internet users in China, which number in the vicinity of 300 million, will appreciate this.

Google, the official blog, the first statement, that they work together to identify malicious sites and non-profit StopBadware.org site occurs because of the announced list. StopBadware.org is that with their own blog pages, this claim was rejected. Summarized in the following definition was told: “Google’s problem is causing us to list the claim is false. Google the list of sites that identify themselves, and this list we know that has nothing to do. With Google, a new description to do is to call.”

This explanation immediately after 10 minutes, still more new update is published StopBadware.org blog. In Update, Google will make a new description specified.

But what it is it? We’ll, if you haven’t already worked it out, the GDrive is a multi-gigabyte online storage facility provided by Google. It’s not a new idea and several companies already offer such a service, but for a fee, and that’s the key difference. Everyone expects GDrive capacity to be free, and there would be plenty of it, possibly enough to match the kind of hard drive capacities we’re used to on desktop PCs. If that happens something magical and a bit scary could occur. It could mean the end of Windows; PCs would no longer need a large hard dive to store the operating system, applications and data since it could all be stored online. What’s more, if Google went head with another oft-rumoured project and developed its own operating system, a PC could be reduced to a nothing more than a cheap, dumb terminal. This is the so-called ‘Cloud’ computer concept, where everything is online, and it could happen, though I have to say it would be a cold day in hell, and take a seismic change in web security and service stability before I trusted all my precious data and personal details to the Internet…

Google Chrome has a unique minimalist look that easily separates itself from other browsers. The browser bars are not cluttered full of different options, menus and toolbars, instead it only features your most used browser features, like the back and forward arrows, bookmark button, bookmark toolbar address bar, go button, and two pull down icons for page settings and internet options.

Google Chrome is a lightweight web browser that is very quick to start up, and it doesn’t appear to use that much memory. It’s very responsive and peppy while surfing the web and using browser features.

It also has a very nifty start page that includes thumbnails and links to your most visited web pages, as well links on the side to your bookmarks. It also has a search bar to search for web pages in your browsing history. This unique start page takes less than half a second to load, it’s almost instantaneous.

The address box offers suggestions as well as lets you search Google, shows your previous web history and auto completes the web address.

Another unique thing that Google Chrome allows you to do is open up an incognito window/tab that lets you do all of your ’secret’ browsing without leaving a trace on your computer, so you don’t have to remember to clean up your internet mess before the roommates come home, or some unsuspecting person gets on your computer.

The release Google Chrome marks an important day in browsing history. Its the day that Google enters into the web browsing market, and I think now we can officially say that Google has now become a world power. Just wait until they release their own cell phone. Then shortly after it will be their own cell phone service they’re releasing. And after that? Well, can anyone say… world domination?

Google Chrome has a unique minimalist look that easily separates itself from other browsers. The browser bars are not cluttered full of different options, menus and toolbars, instead it only features your most used browser features, like the back and forward arrows, bookmark button, bookmark toolbar address bar, go button, and two pull down icons for page settings and internet options.

Google Chrome is a lightweight web browser that is very quick to start up, and it doesn’t appear to use that much memory. It’s very responsive and peppy while surfing the web and using browser features.

It also has a very nifty start page that includes thumbnails and links to your most visited web pages, as well links on the side to your bookmarks. It also has a search bar to search for web pages in your browsing history. This unique start page takes less than half a second to load, it’s almost instantaneous.

The address box offers suggestions as well as lets you search Google, shows your previous web history and auto completes the web address.

Another unique thing that Google Chrome allows you to do is open up an incognito window/tab that lets you do all of your ’secret’ browsing without leaving a trace on your computer, so you don’t have to remember to clean up your internet mess before the roommates come home, or some unsuspecting person gets on your computer.

The release Google Chrome marks an important day in browsing history. Its the day that Google enters into the web browsing market, and I think now we can officially say that Google has now become a world power. Just wait until they release their own cell phone. Then shortly after it will be their own cell phone service they’re releasing. And after that? Well, can anyone say… world domination?