HTC Flyer Reviews

[exhibitmag]

The competition in the Tablet world is all set to hot up, as HTC has decided to launch their own Android powered 7-in Tablet called Flyer in April. The Taiwan based company has decided to empower the Tablet with the latest Honeycomb build for a Gingerbread version it can customize with it’s own ‘Sense’ UI. While all that is well and good, for most buyers the form, feel and look of the Tablet are proving to be the main focus. So, has HTC managed to get these as a selling point for their Tablet? Let’s take a closer look.

Display: The HTC Flyer has a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen with what’s been called as an active digitizer. This addition is for enabling the use of the stylus which comes pre-loaded with the Tablet. It’s not just any stylus that users will get to use, however, it’s a tool that was developed in partnership with N-Trig (the company that has made digitizers for convertible PCs like the Dell Latitude XT). The screen has 1024x600 pixels for resolution, which is lower than Motorola Xoom’s 1280x800 pixels. Of course, the Xoom does have a larger screen – measuring 10 inches – so this is not really a deal breaker for the Flyer. The look of the display is fairly good, and the colour reproduction is accurate and quite pleasing to the eye. Despite being smaller than Xoom, it actually is thicker than Moto’s Tablet – 13.2 mm compared to 12.9 mm for the Xoom. The only edge that Flyer has in this area is, that it is a lot easier to handle with one hand – compared to the slightly bigger Xoom and Samsung Tab as well.



OS, Apps and Processor: The Flyer, as stated earlier, comes with the latest Android OS : Gingerbread. While Google has been stating that the Gingerbread with Honeycomb build has been specially designed for Tablets, HTC has still gone ahead and customized this with their ‘Sense’ interface. That might not be such a bad thing, but most users might feel that they still would’ve wanted the raw feel of the Gingerbread over the customized version provided by HTC. Since the Tablet has the Android OS pre-loaded, it would allow users to download and access all the Apps available in the Android App store. The processor used for powering the Flyer is a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, with 1GB RAM and 32 GB of flash storage on-board as well. While this may appear to be slightly inferior to the completion offering 1 GHz dual core CPUs (read Xoom and Tab) it still performs quite admirably, and most users will not find anything to complain about.

Unless you are big on games with high-end graphics, and a lot of multitasking, this Tablet will not disappoint.

Camera and connectivity options: The HTC Flyer is powered with a 5 megapixel camera on the back, which is capable of recording HD videos – the front has a 1.3 megapixel camera only. This is, of course, inferior to the 2MP front cam that the competition has to offer (again : Xoom and Tab), but considering 3G is not yet fully operational in India and WiFi is not oh-so-popular yet, this might not go against the Flyer. Of course, the Flyer offers only WiFi connectivity and Bluetooth 3.0 – which means that the Xoom and Tab win out yet again with HDMI and micro-usb additions onboard.



Conclusion: So, there you have it folks! The new Tablet on the block performs admirably overall, but a few inches here and a few there – might go against it. It does feel and look a lot less polished than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, but it is cheaper – and to be fair, it does everything quite well that you would expect from a worthy gadget. We will leave you with the full specs of this soon to be released Tablet, and let you make up your mind about it. Good luck!

[Grant Lamontagne]

Interesting.... but yu DO realize this is a multitool forum, right?

Der

[665ae]

Interesting.... but yu DO realize this is a multitool forum, right?

Der

Wait... What?  Seriously?

[Woz]

Hm, maybe you can use it as a hammer too

[jekostas]

eBook reader, internet brower, recipe book, paperweight, plate, hammer, ballistic shield, sunshade, frisbee, footstool, child whacker, signalling mirror, artist's tablet...

[cliosguy]

Interesting.... but yu DO realize this is a multitool forum, right?

Der

Wait... What?  Seriously?

Damn! i thought this forum was about chipmunk phishing