HTC Flyer review

Having been first out of the blocks with an Android smartphone, HTC bided its time when it came to releasing a tablet, and has taken an original approach with its first model, the Flyer. It’s a 7in tablet rather than the more popular 10in format, and instead of Google’s brand new Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, it runs for a heavily-customised version of Android 2.3. It has a touchscreen, but it also comes with a sophisticated stylus that can draw, highlight and erase.

The Flyer’s 7in display means it’s significantly smaller than the iPad 2 – it’s around 5cm shorter and 6cm less wide, but is very slightly fatter. It’s also lighter, at 420g instead of 601g. If you think the iPad 2, Asus Transformer or other tablets are too large, the 7in size could suit you. It also feels very well made – with its aluminium unibody capped by comfortable to hold plastic end pieces at the top and bottom – in portrait mode.

The display has a resolution of 1,024 x 600, compared to the 1,024 x 768 of the iPad 2 and 1,280 x 800 of Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer. This leaves slightly less vertical room for web pages, but the screen’s reduced size means text is clear. Viewing angles are wide and colours are vibrant, too – it’s a lovely tablet to hold and use.

We’re often wary of customised variations of Android – there’s no doubting that Android’s Achilles heel is fragmentation (having too many non-standard devices that dilute customers’ expectations of the Android experience). However, HTC’s Sense software has always been an exception: its changes to the user interface are subtle and practical, and its bundled apps are generally superior to the default Android versions.

Sense includes many customisation options for the homescreen, with Themes that provide different apps and widgets as well as change the operating system’s look. As on HTC’s smartphones, you can pinch to see the ‘helicopter view’, with all homescreens visible on one screen as smaller tiles. In landscape mode, however, the homescreens now wrap around in a carousel, which is clearer. There’s also an extra shortcut bar at the bottom of the screen, with icons for the applications tray, a customisation menu, and three customisable slots for app shortcuts.

In terms of standard apps, Sense’s additions and replacements are hit-and-miss. The People app’s ability to link contacts together from multiple services – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, last.fm, Flickr, Skype, and any other app that adds itself to the Accounts database – is its strongest feature, and the people-focused aggregation of status messages, events and even photo uploads really is an improvement on the standard contact card metaphor.

In other areas, though, Sense duplicates functionality, and it’s not always an improvement. Sense’s Twitter app is poor (though not as bad as Twitter’s official app) and HTC has replaced Android’s Gallery app with a much inferior list view that doesn’t sync with Picasa, even though it does pull in photos from other services. However instead of pulling in photos, it simply lists your contacts, adding an extra layer between you and the images.

For the tablet market, HTC has provided not just apps, but also services. There’s Amazon’s MP3 store, an ebook reader app that offers eBooks from Kobo, a Press Reader app that offers subscriptions to newspapers from around the world from PressDisplay.com, and a Watch app with films and TV shows for rent or purchase direct from HTC.

HTC’s Watch uses video streaming technology acquired with the purchase of UK company Saffron Digital in February this year. When you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it, but once you start you have to watch it within 48 hours. Most major new film releases are featured, and cost £10 to buy or £3.50 to rent. TV show single episodes are only available to buy outright, for £1.50 each, but there’s currently only a small selection available.

In landscape mode, many of the Flyer’s built-in apps switch to a handy two-pane mode – for example the email app lists individual email in the left pane, and loads the selected email in the right pane. We also liked the new behaviour of the application tray, which has two new views accessible from icons at the bottom: Frequent and Downloaded apps. This saves you scrolling through all the pre-installed apps. You can also change the view to a list rather than tiled icons, and uninstall apps via the menu.

Sense has a power-saving mode, which can trigger after the battery falls below a customisable level. For example, you can tell it which functions to turn off when in power-saving mode, and how much to dim the backlight. It’s not as flexible as third-party apps such as Locale, but it works fairly well. We haven’t had time to run our battery tests yet, so we can’t comment on battery life, but we’ll update the review as soon as the results are available.

The Flyer’s stylus, which sits in a slot in the supplied case, isn’t just a dumb screen-poking tool – it’s well worth paying attention to the tutorial that runs the first time you use it. The first thing it tells you is, “Your pen is for drawing”, and if you then try and use the pen to tap the next button, the message is rammed home: “Pen is for drawing. Tap the button with your finger to continue.”

There are two modes: scribble and inking. The two modes are accessed through a dedicated button that only works with the stylus. Inking is essentially a notepad where you can type, draw or highlight using the stylus, and some apps also support highlighting. Scribble mode takes a snapshot of your current activity – whether it’s a web page, game or other app – and then lets you draw on it to your heart’s content. The results are then saved as a clip and uploaded via Evernote, a free cloud storage app.

It’s a novel approach to using a stylus – on most tablets we’ve seen, the stylus was there to make up for tiny, finger-unfriendly controls or an insensitive touchscreen. On the Flyer, the stylus is a bonus extra, with multiple functions and a wide range of options, such as a choice of pen types, colours and nib sizes.

Like many modern smartphones, the Flyer is based around the Qualcomm Snapdragon “system-on-a-chip” – a combination of a 1.5GHz single-core ARM processor and an HD-ready graphics co-processor that can accelerate most multimedia including SVG graphics and Flash video. Backed up by 1GB of RAM, the Flyer scored 1890 in Quadrant – less than dual-core Snapdragon devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 or Motorola Xoom, but more than the single-core HTC Desire S or the Sony Ericsson Xperia arc.

In practice, we noticed very little lag in the interface or within apps. BBC iPlayer, YouTube (in HD) and our video test files all played smoothly, and even a large spreadsheet opened quickly in the pre-installed Polaris Office app (you also get a PDF Reader). It helps that there’s tons of memory, both for running apps and storage space; the advertised 32GB of internal memory is split into 8GB of app space and 20GB for general storage, plus there’s a microSDHC card slot that can accept 32GB cards.

The Flyer is available in two models: this model with 3G and 32GB of storage costs £600. It’s not much better on contract either, being currently only available from Three for £169 plus £31 a month for 24 months. A far better option is the Wi-Fi-only model with 16GB of internal storage for £480.

While this might seem a lot to pay for a smaller tablet, we found the 7in Flyer to be a great alternative to 10in models – it’s size makes it more practical to carry on a daily basis, or to hold for long periods, but it’s still large enough to make browsing the web a pleasure. The stylus is also a useful extra, and best of all, it feels great to use and looks brilliant.

However, you can buy either an Apple iPad 2 or the Asus Eee pad Transformer for under £400. That makes the Flyer around £80 too much, plus the ageing but capable 7in Samsung Galaxy Tab is now available for around £300. While you may miss some features, the price difference is too great to ignore.

The Flyer then is a great tablet, and it will appeal to those who want something really portable, or just to those who like to doodle, but it’s just too expensive to recommend outright to everyone, and so misses out on an award.