Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her HTC Magic camera phone.

Sat 05.30.09 - Even though the Google Android HTC Magic phone only has a 3.2 megapixel camera, HTC and the Android team have put them heavy lifting image algorithms to work, as this mobile device takes the best looking photos daytime and strong light I have seen from a device that is under 5 megapixels. The phone has no flash, so night time or action photos are usually blurred.

The new Google Android phone did a great job on local flowers today even though the daylight was gray from June Gloom cloud cover. I purposely put the camera lens within 4 inches of the big vine flower. The camera auto-focused on the buds behind and to the left of the big flower, as well as distorted the color of the big flower a bit to the orange, but nonetheless, the photo turned out surprisingly nice for a 3.2 mp camera with no close-up function.

The big failing so far with the HTC Magic is that there is not a sharing application, like Shozu, to send the images to places on the web. From the photo gallery one can send the photos to email, messaging, and Picassa, but not to Flickr or to one's blog.