HTC Flyer is the first Android tablet from HTC, which runs on the Android 2.4 version. Equipped with the HTC Sense UI and HTC Scribe technology, the tablet features a 7-inch touchscreen display, 1.5 GHz processor, 5 MP camera, front facing camera and 3G connectivity.
The sleek tablet comes with a magic pen, empowering you to create masterpieces with a stroke of a paintbrush, take multimedia notes and sign digital documents. HTC Flyer comes with a price tag of Rs. 35,000 for the Indian market.
With rest of the industry rushing to manufacture 10inch tablets, HTC has opted to go down theiPad route with the Flyer, complete with curved aluminium back. It’s not a bad looking device, but the white plastic caps at either end of the case do look and feel a little cheap. The top cap does come off to reveal the SIM card slot on 3G-equipped models.
Anyone with an aversion to Apple has had a long wait for a serious iPad alternative, but new Android-powered tablets from a number of manufacturers look promising. That said, we weren’t overly impressed by the recently reviewed 10.1inch Motorola Xoom , if only because it wasn't different enough from the iPad 2, unlike the unique 10.1inch Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Like Asus and the Transformer, HTC has deployed a couple of new ideas in its first tablet, the Flyer.
At 13cm wide in portrait mode, the HTC Flyer is easy enough to grasp between the thumb and fingers of one (medium-size) hand, but the narrow bezel makes it tricky to hold securely in any other way without getting a thumb over the screen.
However, this problem doesn’t persists in landscape mode, thanks to a slightly wider bezel on the shorter two sides and curved case edges that afford some extra purchase; these also keep the screen lifted off a hard surface when the Flyer is placed face-down.
A similar neat design touch is that the four touch-sensitive Android OS buttons that run along the bottom of the screen are duplicated on the left side — or the bottom, when the Flyer is in landscape orientation.
At 420g, the HTC Flyer is considerably lighter than the iPad 2 and Motorola Xoom, but the 7inch screen also means that it’s smaller — it has about the same footprint as the Amazon Kindle 3. This makes it that more portable as a result and, for us at least, makes it feel less obtrusive when whipped out in public. The screen’s 1,024 x 600 resolution is lower than the iPad’s and Xoom’s too, but the smaller diagonal means that its pixel density is higher than both at 170ppi. It still isn’t the sharpest of screens, nor are colours particularly vibrant, but it’s still bright and clear enough. The widescreen resolution also makes it a great for watching movies.
HTC has made a vague promise that the Flyer will get a Honeycomb upgrade soon.The Android 2.3.3 operating system used on the HTC Flyer is designed for smartphones rather than tablets, but the various Android Market apps we tried all used the screen resolution properly with no scaling issues. That said, Android 3.0 Honeycomb for tablets, and the apps designed for it, handle larger screens more gracefully with, for example, a split-screen Gmail app that shows the inbox alongside a message’s content. On the Flyer, Gmail uses the same inbox-only view as Android smartphones and the list of messages is just considerably longer (or wider). HTC has made a vague promise that the Flyer will get a Honeycomb upgrade soon.
Until then, the HTC Sense UI otherwise makes good use of the larger screen, but there isn’t quite the same range of personalisation options found on the Sensation smartphone. While the Sensation can show Twitter feeds, email and more on its custom Lock screen, the Flyer has just a local weather forecast - it’s a shame that the extra screen space can’t be more fully exploited. HTC has, however, chosen to exploit the Flyer’s big screen in one other way — with a stylus.
Perhaps realising that not everyone will want to doodle on a capacitive multitouch screen, the stylus — or HTC Flyer Magic Pen ST D500 — is an optional extra, but the lack of a silo on the Flyer for storage when it isn’t in use.
The stylus, which is powered by a single AAA battery, is about the size and shape of a ballpoint pen and the large plastic tip works well on the glass screen. Usefully, the stylus can be used anywhere in Android, where a tap on the screen triggers an instant screenshot that can then be scribbled on, making it perfect for annotating everything from web pages to photos.Stylus input just isn’t responsive enough for handwritten notes.
There’s also a dedicated Notes app (courtesy of Evernote) that can mix typed text and scribbles for more flexible note taking. A stylus tap on the dedicated button at the bottom right of the screen also pops out a menu with the usual selection of pen styles, colours and thicknesses.
We’ve used ‘scribble’ rather than ‘write’ when it comes to describing how the stylus works with the HTC Flyer, and for good reason. Although the set-up works well enough for drawing, stylus input just isn’t responsive enough for handwritten notes. Write quickly and the result is an illegible scrawl; write slowly and the lag between the stylus tip and the line following it is too large for anything more than the odd few words. More annoying is the fact that the stylus can only be used for writing and won’t work with any other part of the Android UI, so a fingertip is still needed to press on-screen buttons.
More artistically-inclined users will be interested to hear that the stylus is pressure-sensitive, but it doesn't seem to have many levels of sensitivity as far we could tell. We were only only able to get three thicknesses of brush with varying pressure.
A single-core 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM should make the HTC Flyer run well enough, but while the Sense interface works smoothly, web pages are often a little sluggish to scroll and full-screen Flash video is rather jerky, although full-screen H264 video has no such problem. In benchmarks, the Flyer scored 1952 in the Quadrant Standard combined CPU and GPU test, and 2357 in the SunSpider JavaScript web page test, while it ran for an impressive 16 and a half hours when playing full-screen MP4 video in airplane mode. The Flyer uses Android 2.3.3 for smartphones, rather than the more tablet-friendly Android 3.0.