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The HTC Magic is the second Google mobile phone, following the G1. It is an Android mobile phone; created by Google in partnership with Android Inc. Android phones allow for free application creation by users using open source software.

The HTC Magic is 4.45 by 2.17 by 0.54 inches. It weighs 4.18 ounces. Its specifications include 7.5 hours of talk time battery life, and 18 days of standby time battery life. Its main screen has a 320 x 480 pixels resolution, measuring at 3.2 inches. Its main screen is capacitive rather than resistive. Multimedia features include an MPEG4, 3GPP video player and an MP3 music player. It has 288 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM software memory. It has Wi-Fi and 2.0 Bluetooth. It also has GPS.

The Android software used in the second Google phone is version 1.5, also known as Cupcake. The high quality of the touch-screen features strongly in the HTC Magic’s reviews. The screen is responsive and easy to use. The HTC Magic is smaller than the iPhone, but this works in its favour in terms of ease of manual manipulation.

A drawback of the HTC Magic is the relatively poor quality of the music player. There is no headphone jack, limiting the use of the music application. Compared with the iPhone 4, its main competitor in many ways, the HTC Magic is less stylish in its design. The white model of the mobile phone can discolour quite easily.

HTC Magic, the second Google phone is an enjoyable phone that delivers a great user experience.  Like other Android phones, the HTC Magic is slick and effective, delivering a wide variety of Android based applications and software.  The Magic is a unique entry into the market, and while it may have its shortcomings, the phone as a whole delivers on its promises, and is able to deliver most anything you can expect from a modern smart phone.

What stands out the most about the Magic is the screen.  It’s a large, bright, vibrant, colourful display that offers a sharp image, and relatively low battery life consumption.  Entering text is a breeze on the virtual keypad, though it is much easier in landscape mode.  The responsive nature of the phone, with the high degree of accuracy, has eliminated much of the frustration that plagued early touch screen phones.

While the Magic is a great mobile phone to use, the media functionality however leaves much to be desired.  With no 3.5mm headphone jack, this is clearly not for music lovers.  While this was never the main draw of the device, it’s frustrating that such a simple addition was never made.  The camera has no flash, and has an unacceptable shutter lag, for such a modern phone.

As a whole, it’s frustrating when modern smart phones simply do away with certain pieces of technology.  A camera flash is nothing new or “smart”, and there’s no reason why it should not be included in such new smart phone models.

The HTC Legend is the successor to the very popular HTC Hero mobile phone. It is the first HTC handset to come in a unibody aluminium casing. The HTC Legend is an Android smartphone. Android mobile phones, developed by Android Inc and Google, use open source software to allow users to create and share mobile phone applications.

The HTC Legend is 4.41 by 2.22 by 0.45 inches. It weighs 4.44 ounces. Its battery life is an impressive 8 hours of talk time, 18 days (440 hours) of standby time. The main display screen of the HTC Legend is 320 x 480 pixels in resolution, is 3.2 inches in size, uses capacitive technology and is multi-touch.

The HTC Legend’s camera has 5 megapixels resolution, and the inbuilt camera has LED flash, autofocus and geo tagging. The video player has MPEG4, WMV, 3GP and 3G2 capability. The music player supports files in MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV, M4A (Apple lossless), AMR, OGG and MIDI format and has FM radio.

The operating software is relatively new: Android 2.1 following on from Android 1.5 (also known as Cupcake). Internet browsing is through HTML or flash and the HTC Legend has microUSB, Wi-Fi and 2.1 Bluetooth.

The unibody casing looks and feels great. In this respect, the HTC Legend is rather minimalistic and sophisticated. The screen is highly responsive and multi touch, allowing for multiple home pages to be scanned quickly. Sound and picture quality are good if not excellent.

The HTC Legend is the successor to the HTC Hero and it is the first handset by HTC which has a ‘unibody’ casing made from aluminium.  The casing gives the phone a smooth sleek look and gives it a touch of class that a plastic phone does not have.  At the same time it manages to look simple. 

The handset has a 3.2 inch screen which gives a sharp image and responds well to the touchpad function; the trackball feature from the Hero has been replaced with an optical joystick.  It is an Android phone and has the Sense interface.  Sense offers a number of useful applications which give the user easy access to a lot of information, such as contact lists and weather forecasts.  Users can also easily customise the home page.

The HTC Legend makes social networking much easier with a feature called ‘friend stream’, making different networking sites easy to view.  The web browser also allows easy access to other internet sites and text from sites can be copied without difficulty.  The Legend also responds to the way the user is holding it and the screen will move from portrait to landscape modes when the phone is turned and the sensitive touch screen keypad makes mistyping less likely. 

The phone has a 5-megapixel camera though picture quality is not always great and occasionally the Wi-Fi reception is not very strong.  There are not as many Android applications as other operating systems have but new ones are being added all the time. 

The HTC Snap is an incredibly versatile phone, which considering its thickness is something of a marvel. They managed to get a full QWERTY keyboard onto the handset and the Snap also comes with Wi-Fi, GPS and HSPDA as well.

The keypad has nicely raised keys, which are really responsive and make texting or emailing a breeze. It operates in a similar fashion to the BlackBerry and pushes emails making accessing accounts convenient. A useful feature is the “inner circle” where you can group together important contacts and access all their emails at once.

HTC has made using the Windows mobile system a success by keeping it simple, doing away with the fiddly touch screen, and making the system actually work.

Along with its superb keyboard the Snap has a fairly good 2-megapixel camera, with video facility, an audio player that supports all the major formats and a pretty decent battery life. There is no flash or auto-focus with the camera and it does not come with FM radio, but its connectivity is good with Bluetooth, mini USB and a 192MB memory.

There is the perennial complaint about leaving out the 3.5mm headphone jack, which is directed at many phone manufacturers, but on the whole the Snap is an excellent mobile. This is primarily a business, emailing phone and not a touch screen with multimedia mobile cinema, so if you are looking for a good phone to keep you in touch with the office this is the one.

The HTC Touch 2 is equipped with the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, which has limitations but these are helped a great deal with the installation of HTC’s TouchFLO interface.  This improves the usability of the system and helps the user to navigate through the menus. 

Windows 6.5 does offer an Internet Explorer browser which can display full web pages with a zoom in function to make viewing easier.  The operating system also gives access to My Phone.  This is a service from Microsoft which can back up all your data via a remote server.  This ensures that if the phone is lost, the information on it is not.

Users can make use of applications which allow instant messaging for keeping in touch on the move and GPS navigation for helping you to keep on the move.  Additional applications can be added if required.  There is a 3.2 megapixel camera and a 2.8 inch screen, though some may find this restrictive when viewing videos.  Extra memory function can be added with a removable memory card and a USB connection allows for easy data transfer. 

The touch screen requires more than a gentle pressure from the user and the phone has no feature to allow the screen to adapt to the way it is being held, unlike some handsets that will rotate the screen if the phone is turned.

The phone is a compact smart phone which is a good choice for those looking for a smaller alternative to the iPhone, but it does have a few limitations.