HTC Flyer Tablet: Hands On

BARCELONA -- HTC is zigging where other tablet makers are zagging. The new HTC Flyer, a 7-inch tablet, runs a heavily customized version of Android Gingerbread rather than Honeycomb to start, and it has a pen. I played with one for a while, and I still have mixed feelings.

The HTC Flyer will get an upgrade to Honeycomb, an HTC rep said. That surprised me because it uses a 1.5Ghz single-core Qualcomm processor, and all the Honeycomb tablets I've seen so far are dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 devices. After asking around elsewhere, I discovered that Google has told OEMs that they need to use Tegra 2 to get into the first round of Honeycomb, but that they'll be able to try out any hardware they want with Honeycomb later. I'm a little worried. The 1.5Ghz processor didn't feel 1.5 times as fast as the Samsung Galaxy Tab's 1Ghz processor, but that may be because my HTC Flyer had an early version of the software.

MWC Bug Art

Honeycomb will clearly take a while, though, because HTC has customized the OS on here more than on any other high-quality Android tablet I've ever seen. HTC Sense has full-screen widgets with "3D effects" that make graphical elements tilt back and forth when you tilt the tablet. Different full-screen widgets spotlight email, media, and e-book reading. When you turn the tablet, by the way, the standard Android touch buttons move along the bezel so they're always at the bottom. That's neat; it's also non-standard.

The really crazy stuff, though, has to do with the stylus. The Flyer comes with a dull silver stylus with two buttons on it. You can use the stylus to annotate almost anything. If you start scribbling on a Web page, the tablet takes a still "snapshot" of the page and lets you draw on it. You can annotate e-books, and the tablet comes with dedicated notepad and sketchbook apps - yes, they're different. The notepad app pops up a keyboard, while the sketchbook doesn't. HTC clearly thought this through.

The Flyer itself is lighter than other tablets I've felt recently, although I've been lifting a lot of 10-inch tablets. There's a lot to be said for the 7-inch form factor, as Samsung has discovered with the Galaxy Tab; it's pocketable, for one thing.

I managed to check out HTC's Watch movie app, but not the OnLive streaming game service. Watch looked a lot like other movie stores that are out there, such as Samsung Hub and Apple's iTunes store. Prices were insanely low ($3.50 for "Black Hawk Down?") but I'm assuming that was a placeholder. Movies downloaded using Watch will be viewable as soon as a significant chunk of the movie has been received, so you don't have to wait for the whole thing to arrive.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the Flyer. Is there room for a Gingerbread tablet at all, in a world of Honeycomb? And don't people hate styli? Gingerbread isn't optimized for tablets, but HTC has done a lot of work here to make it look good - this doesn't look like a big phone. As always, price and performance will play a big role in the success of HTC's first tablet.