Unboxing the HTC Magic (Android G2) phone

My Mom always told me that if you don’t ask you’ll never get and this is true of the HTC Magic phone which I received from the kind team at Leaf over the weekend.

I plan on doing quite a detailed blog post reviewing the phone and sharing my experiences but for now I thought I’d share the unboxing pics I took. You can view the full set of pics on Flickr over here.

What I will do is give you my initial thoughts which are mostly positive. The Android interface is super sexy and very intuative and for the most part is pretty damn stable. I’ve only experienced one or two freeze ups on some applications but I think that is application specific.

The major problem for me so far is the fact that the Android Marketplace (think Apple’s App Store for the iPhone) is not going to be available in South Africa. I have contacted the guys at Leaf to get more details and once I get an official response I’ll add that to my conclusive review of the phone. The Android Market place is a key element to extending an Android phone and considering the phone will retail for around R8,200 there has to be something to replace it else I’m not sure it’s worth it.

That said, I’ve already played around with Android mobile application development and Afrigator now has a Gatorpeeps Android application which you can download over here. You can see screenshots of the application in action and it was fun learning to do this.

I’ve still got the phone for about another week so I’m going to test it extensively and hopefully my full review will be an unbiased look at how the phone compares to others in the market.