HTC revealed its Magic Smartphone, the first Android mobile phone to run on Vodafone's network, at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona. It is likely to be released this spring.

Patrick Chomet, the Global Director of Terminals at Vodafone said, "Delivering an unbeatable mobile internet experience for our customers is a priority for Vodafone, so we are very excited to be introducing our first Android-powered smartphone in the spring".

HTC and Vodafone said, the new phone will have high-end internet capabilities and applications. Peter Chou, the president and chief executive at HTC said, "The HTC Magic embodies the compact style and sophistication for which HTC has come to be known, with the powerful and intuitive internet experience for which the Android platform was designed. We are proud of our partnership with Vodafone and excited about making the Android-powered HTC Magic available to Vodafone customers in Europe".
Christian Lindholm, Director of mobile design consultancy Fjord, said that the new device, which has a 3.2" touch-screen display and uses a trackball for navigation is comparable to the iPhone and Nokia's N97 handset.

"I do think it's a huge step forward – the G1 was really a developer platform sold to users," he said. "It’s a worthy challenger to the iPhone and N97, although I'd prefer it to have a keyboard because text input on the move is almost chronically bad".

Freescale, the chip manufacturer of Android, used Mobile World Congress 2009 to announce plans to add chipsets for the open source mobile operating system to its own roster. The chip manufacturer said that it had worked with a number of firms and technologies to ensure that its chip ecosystem was capable of running a variety of operating systems.