As promised, the quality is not brilliant (due to smaller file size), but hopefully shows the main points :-)

HTC-Magic / Android Demo from i love my linux on Vimeo.

Absolutely amazing!!!  I am so in love with this phone, it truly is a geeks paradise!  Don't get me wrong, there are a few things are stupid and things that need work, but on the whole i think this phone rocks the party that rocks the party!  

First things first, how does it compare with the so called "Jesus Phone"... well according to our friends at el'Reg, the HTC-Magic review scored 85% and the new iPhone 3G S only scored 80% - I leave you to make your mind up on that.  Comparing my Magic with a friends iPhone 3G, I can say there are points where the Magic wins hands down, and others where the iPhone is a step ahead.  Overall, I prefer the Magic, but I would, considering I'm a Linux zealot.

Lets look at some individual areas:
Bluetooth leaves A LOT to be desired.  At the moment it can only do mono-audio.  it works with my nokia bluetooth headset without too much function loss, but that's all.  No data transfer, no tethering and no contact sharing or picture sending.  So if you want to send your mate a picture you have, you will have to do it via email (which it is set up to do very easily).  I believe the iPhone suffered with this as well, but may now have been fixed?

The keyboard - it's ok... lets be honest here, I have fat fingers and it's very small, but it's actually becoming more functional the more I use it.  It's saving grace is the auto correction. many miss hit letters get fixed pretty well.  I just have to be careful that I don't send texts or emails with the wrong words in when it auto-corrects incorrectly (similar to predictive text errors)! This is happening less and less though as i add more custom words to the dictionary and get more proficient with the keyboard.  you can always turn the phone horizontally and use the width to great effect.

Why, oh why, would you not put a 3.5mm jack for earphones on a multimedia device.  I mean really, the mini-usb connection! I've had to get an adaptor so that I can use my own earphones.

Battery life is limited and very dependent on how hard you are hitting it.  Using it during the day, lots of emails, web browsing and texting, it has died before on me in less than 12hrs.  This is mitigated slightly by the fact that it does only take a couple of hours to recharge, and because it charges through the mini-ubs socket, any computer is a potential power source.  On average now i get about 36-48hrs life out of it.  Dependent of course on what i'm doing with it.

Connectivity to Ubuntu is super easy, plug in and mount the SD Card out of the box with no issues (the phone comes with a 2GB Micro SD card).  The SD card can be hot swapped which is good. Music transfered easily and you can just build your own files system because the music player uses tags to organise your music and searches the card automagically. Still fighting with album art (should ideally download this itself) but slowly getting there with picard and reassigning the mp3 tags.  Oh, how good is this, ogg files played for me without any additional fiddling!

Applications:
The preloaded applications are good, gmail, email and google chat are very good. The Android Market is filled with tons of applications, but here is a list of what I currently have installed:

I've left of the rest of the random games I have, but there are tons to get if you want :-)

Overall I'm very very happy, and hopefully will get a short video posted before the end of the week with a quick demo of the interface.