HTC Magic :: Typing Messenger Slightly Laggy?

Firstly, I have an HTC Magic, so no hardware keyboard for me, only soft. I've found that typing can often be quite laggy. It depends on the application in which I'm typing, but Messenger can be quite laggy, especially in landscape, but is no where near as bad as ChompSMS was. On the other hand, Opera beats the default browser hands down (indeed, I think typing in Opera is the smoothest around!) - the default browser's typing is simply terrible when the page loaded has quite a few images and data. Now, I understand why this could be the case (limited ram, etc) but obviously, as a consumer or user, that doesn't make my experience any better.

The other day I reset my phone to factory defaults (gotta love gmail sync up!) and installed only the following apps:

AndNav2
Barcode scanner
BeebPlayer
Netcounter
Postcode Navigator
TTS Service
Useful Switchers

And it still seems pretty laggy. I regularly purge my browser cache and delete all my messenger threads. Is there anything else I'm missing? I love the phone, but this is becomming a bit of an issue for me, and the fact that so many others praise it makes me think there might be something wrong with my phone and/or setup, rather than it being a universal problem.