HTC has a solid reputation with smartphones. That's why it's no surprise that their first tablet, the Flyer, sticks to the tried-and-tested smartphone plan. The family resemblance — especially to other metal-bodied HTC phones is evident.
The Flyer has the sort of aluminium unibody design first made popular by Android phones like the Legend. It's reassuringly solid to hold with no flexing — however, the two white plastic inserts on the back are a different story. The top plastic cover slides off (with some difficulty) to reveal the micro SD and SIM card slot. The lower plastic cover serves no purpose and oddly, sticks out a fair bit, making this portion the thickest part of the tablet. Presumably, it hides the GSM/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth antenna, which would not work very well behind thick metal.
Overall size is similar to other 7-inch tablets like the BlackBerry Playbook and Samsung Galaxy Tab, although thanks to the extensive use of metal, it tips the scales at 420 grams (the BlackBerry Playbook is 425 grams while the Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 is 380 grams).
Unlike other new Android tablets which are flocking to the tablet-specific Android 3.0, the Flyer sticks with Android 2.3 with HTC Sense — HTC has customized their Sense user interface for tablets instead. The advantage of course, is that the full suite of 3,00,000 Android apps is available. The disadvantage is that many of these apps have been designed for smaller phone screens in the first place, so they may not display 'ideally' on a 7-inch screen.
A nice touch are the two sets of capacitive buttons — depending on whether you're holding the Flyer in portrait or landscape, the appropriate set of buttons will light up.
The party trick of the Flyer is the pen input, called HTC Scribe. A battery-powered pen supplied with the unit can be used to write and draw on the screen with more precision than a capacitive stylus will permit. The pen also registers pressure — so drawing lightly will create a thin line but press a little harder and you'll get a thicker line. You can always change pen styles (pen, pencil, brushes), colours and line thickness too.
To activate Scribe, you have to use the pen to tap on the pen icon near the capacitive buttons. You can have endless fun taking photographs and drawing on them, taking a screenshot of anything on the screen and drawing on it or just using a blank notepad.
Two problems here: the pen is not really a capacitive stylus, so it only works in pen mode. When using the pen, there will be occasions when you have to tap a button using your finger — constantly alternating between pen and finger is sometimes confusing.
Second: the pen uses a AAAA battery —not AAA, but AAAA. These are hard to find. At best, we could find them online, listed for 1,200 for six (including shipping to India).
Inside is a single core 1.5Ghz processor, 1GB RAM and 32GB internal storage (of which only 19.6GB is available). The hardware may not rival the best Android tablets, but everything runs along smoothly.
We also have some other gripes. Why include the ability to send/receive text messages but leave out phone functionality? The GSM radio, microphone, speakers and Bluetooth are already there — with phone functionality, it would have worked just like the Galaxy Tab.
And the price is quite absurd for a 7-inch 3G tablet. Sure, Scribe is unique (and useful to some) and HTC Sense for tablet is great, but ask yourself if it is really worth the 14,500 more you pay over something like the Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000.
