HTC Flyer review

As you might expect, HTC’s tablet is built just as well as its phones. The aluminum unibody construction matches that of Apple’s laptops in both design and rigidity. Yes, for the most part the entire body of the tablet is made of metal; however, the chiseled white material along the top and bottom of the rear cover seem to be made of a tough plastic. You’d be mistaken to think those are purely aesthetic — when held in landscape mode, the bottom one actually seems to double as a grip. There aren’t all that many 7-inch tablets on the market, but I can confidently say the Flyer bests the plastic Galaxy Tab and Dell Streak 7 in terms of rigidity and overall make. I’m leaving out RIM’s Playbook as I haven’t actually spent much time with it.

Where the Flyer doesn’t beat the others is on size. The chart above maps it out fairly well — the Flyer’s thicker architecture makes it one of the weightier and wider 7-inchers out there. Indeed, the tablet is noticeably thicker than the Galaxy Tab and Apple’s iPad, and it was the first thing most mentioned. All that said, it is still very easy to grasp in one hand and hold up for longer periods of times. And the curved edges and soft feel of the aluminum make it one of the comfortable 7-inch tablets I’ve used. As I’ve said many times, I am a big big fan of the 7-inch form factor — it makes for a great ereading device and it’s the perfect size for thumb typing in portrait mode.

HTC has kept the sides of the tablet fairly clean. The top edge houses the power button and 3.5mm headphone jack, while a volume rocker dwells on the left side and the charging port on the bottom edge. The aforementioned white plastic piece on the back of the slab can be forcefully (emphasis on forcefully) removed to reveal a MicroSD card slot. However, nowhere to be found is a stylus holder to safely store the $80 pen should you buy it. Since the pen is optional, I guess I can see why HTC didn’t integrate a slot, but it’s a real drag if you opt to buy both. More than a few times I panicked about losing the stylus.

The premium look and feel of the Flyer continues to its 1024 x 600-resolution 7-inch display. It’s not IPS quality, but it is one high-end panel. Viewing angles are superb and the display itself is extremely bright, even when turned down to 65 percent. It’s impressive in its own right, but even more so when you consider that it’s overlaid with N-Trig’s active digitizer, which supports both pen and finger input. There’s more to come on how well the pen works on the display, but the important thing to know here is that it doesn’t impact the general multitouch and LCD viewing experience — there’s none of that old Tablet PC grayness or color depletion.

I’m sad to say the top-notch quality of the components starts to diminish with the speakers on the back of the tablet. The two vertical slits may be backed by SRS enhanced sound, but music sounded overly tinny and lacking in quality. I didn’t have a Playbook to compare it directly to, but given Josh’s affinity for those speakers, I’d say RIM has HTC beat on sound quality.

Sadly, this section of your average tablet review is starting to sound like a damn broken record. Indeed, the five-megapixel camera on the rear of the Flyer is disappointing. Sure, there’s no LED Flash, but even worse are the grainy images that the lens actually captured. As you can see in the gallery below, both indoor and outdoor shots were void of crispness and colors are washed out. To boot, the autofocus is, well, just slow. You have to get in the habit of staying still for a few seconds longer if you don’t want to end up with a blurry image. The 720p footage was similar to what I’ve found on other tablets — the video looks smooth, but the end result just doesn’t look all that HD.

I do have better things to say about the front facing camera, however. The quality isn’t the best, but I at least expect that with a 1.3-megapixel shooter. And while HTC doesn’t include any video calling apps, it does preload its Snapbooth software. Sure, as its name implies, it’s pretty much a Photo Booth knock-off, but it’s still loads of fun. You can select different fun effects, most of which morphs your face in unattractive, yet hilarious ways.

LOCK ScREEN

To unlock the device you simply drag that ring above. However, if you want to launch one of the four apps on the screen — yes, you can customize what apps appear there — just hold down the app and drag it to the middle of the circle. Simple but very clever stuff.

Homescreen CAROUSEL

On the surface, the Flyer still has eight homescreens, which can be customized with a variety of HTC and non-HTC widgets, but it’s no longer a two dimensional experience. Imagine that each one of those slightly transparent panes is a side on a carousel — not only can you quickly twirl the carousel by quickly swiping across the screen but when you swipe slowly to the next pane you can see the edges of the previous pane.

new launch bar

The Flyer has two sets of permanent LED shortcut buttons, including home, back, list, and pen shortcuts. One lives on the bottom bezel and the other on the left bezel (for when in landscape orientation). But in addition to that, there’s also a new "launch bar" across the bottom of the display. Out of the box there are shortcuts to the app drawer, Notes, Reader, Email, and the Personalize menu, however you can swap those middle three out for any of your other favorite apps. The bar, which takes up extra screen real estate, does seem redundant since you can put app shortcuts right on the homscreen, but surely some will like it.

widgets

Some of the widgets in this version of Sense will look familiar, but some have been jazzed up with animations. For instance, the new weather widget actually has moving rain drops if it’s raining. Pretty trippy stuff.

The last of those third-party apps — Evernote — plays a large role in the Flyer’s software experience, or at least it does for those that opt to buy the $80 pen. As I previously mentioned, the tablet functions like any other when the aluminum, battery-powered stylus isn’t hovering over the screen, however, tap the pen to the display or on the pen shortcut on the bezel and you’ve got a real digital notebook.

Simply put, there are only three real applications that let you take advantage of the pen right now. (HTC says it plans to open things up to third party developers, but couldn’t provide more information at the moment.) The first is the Notes app, which is really HTC’s version of Evernote. You can easily open up a new note and draw on the lined paper. You can also sync this with your Evernote account and edit your other documents on the tablet. The implementation is quite good and everything works just as it should.

One of the other apps that works with the pen is called Scribble. However, the only way to launch it is by tapping the pen on the screen, which automatically takes a screenshot and brings up the selection of pen tools. You can then doodle on top of the image. What’s the purpose of that? I asked myself the same question, but it’s actually really useful to be able to snap a picture of a map, draw on top of it, and send it off to a friend. It really is an interesting shortcut, but I cannot tell you how many times I’ve accidentally hit the screen and mistakenly took a screenshot.

The last app to recognize the pen is Reader. You can highlight text in a book or make notes in the margins. As I mentioned before, this doesn’t work in the Kindle app — more on that sort of issue soon.

So how does the pen work in those apps? Extremely well. Sketching is very smooth and you can use the top button on the pen to erase and the bottom to highlight notes in a book. The digitizer also supports pressure sensitivity, so scribbling with a bit more force will darken your strokes. I also found palm rejection to be quite good, but oddly when I handed the tablet to Ross, the side of his wrist kept launching the keyboard and pen palette. The pen does make some distracting clicking noises when first pressed on the screen, but it’s something you’ll get used to. (Note: the tablet won’t just work with any sharp object. It does seem to work with other N-Trig stylui, however. For instance, the one that comes with the HP Slate works.)

Overall, there’s nothing wrong with the "magic pen" implementation — everything works quite well and there are some strong usage scenarios. The apps are lacking at the moment, however. I desperately wanted to have my handwriting converted to text, but the pen simply won’t work in OCR (optical character recognition) apps like Graffiti right now. No, really, other apps will not recognize the pen at an input device — try it and you will just end up with a screenshot in Scribble. At this point, the pen is simply an annotation and doodling tool, which may be fine for some, but I really don’t think its full potential has been reached yet.

The last piece of the equation: battery life. And thankfully, it’s quite impressive. The tablet’s 4000mAh battery lasted seven hours and 29 minutes on our video rundown test, which loops the same standard definition video at 65 percent brightness and WiFi turned on. That’s an hour longer than the Galaxy Tab and four hours longer than the Dell Streak 7. Even better is the fact that the tablet can be charged via a Micro USB cable — none of these proprietary charging cables! The does come with a unique charging cable, but it does work with regular Micro USB cables and adapters.