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Thin is always in, as evidenced by HTC's latest Android-based phone, the Magic. It's lost the Qwerty keyboard from the Dream and now comes in at a sleek 13.65mm.
The Magic feels lighter and thinner and will slip easily into your pocket.
Because it now lacks a keyboard, you'll have to depend more on the touchscreen, and thankfully, there's a noticeable improvement in its responsiveness.
But you still can't pull off multi-touch gestures on the device.
The trackball from the Dream remains, and it will help you zip through menus and emails with ease.
The onscreen keyboard was intuitive to use and although it did feel slightly cramped on the 3.2-inch screen, the auto-correcting function fixed most of our typos.
We also liked the fact that the keyboard would predict and suggest multiple words as we typed.
With the phone running the Android operating system, you can expect tight integration with Google's Internet services. But what's useful is when you combine the smartphone's hardware-based features with the software.
When you launch Google Maps, for example, the phone can locate you on a map, thanks to its built-in GPS tracking, and point you to your destination, thanks to a digital compass.
The smartphone comes with a 3.2-megapixel camera and connects you to the Web via 3.5G (with download speeds up to 7.2Mbps) and WiFi (802.11b/g).
We were disappointed with the omission of a 3.5mm headphone jack and the onboard storage (512B of ROM, 288MB of RAM). You can expand its storage through a microSD slot.
The Magic is costly too, at S$1,048 with a 2GB memory card, but it does look like the best Android-based smartphone yet.
- TODAY/yb
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