HTC Flyer review

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.