Posts Tagged ‘Android’

Posted on May 28, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

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.

 

Posted on May 19, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Vodacom – please send me an HTC Magic

Vodacom, if you’re listening, I want to make it abundantly clear that I will not, under any circumstances, turn down an HTC Magic from you. Seriously though, since I found out Vodacom were bringing the HTC Magic to South Africa I’ve been scampering around trying to get my hands on one.

I’ve been an iPhone owner since January 2008 and this is by far the longest I’ve ever kept a phone without feeling the need for a replacement. Over the last 16 months I’ve written extensively about my experiences around being an iPhone user and rightly so – it’s the single biggest mobile device to hit the world since say… the Android OS.

While I still love my iPhone it’s time to part ways and the Android operating system has had me excited since it was announced. I doubt the Magic is really the iPhone killer but it’s clear that Android devices are going to get better and smarter as the technology and OS evolve.

Yesterday evening I was listening to the latest ZA Tech Podcast, aptly titled Paranoid Android, where Toby Shapshak takes us through some of the coolness that is the HTC Magic and now I’m even more convinced I need one seeing as my life literally revolves around Google Apps.

Thanks also to Duncan McLeod who mentioned a really cool email client called Postbox which I have duly installed and am now running on my Mac. Since I only use Google Apps for all my email I’ve found email clients (including Apple Mail) to be clunky and generally very slow with the Google IMAP servers however Postbox is not only fast but looks and functions great. Think of tabbed browsing for email and you’ll get an idea as to what Postbox can offer.

On a very amusing sidenote Toby and Simon Dingle claim that I made them swear during the podcast and you’ll see what they mean at around 11:00 minutes in the show. These guys had me in stitches and I’m pleased that I cracked a cool mention on the show.