Pen pal
Something the Flyer has, that the tablets from Samsung, Asus, Apple and the rest of the boys in the band don’t, is a stylus and for once this is a Very Good Thing. The Flyer’s battery-powered pen and HTC Scribe software lets you doodle on screen-grabs or make notes and drawings which can then be saved to the cloud using Evernote. Hopefully other apps like Catch Notes will be supported in due course.
The pen is mightier than the pinkie..?
The stylus can be set to imitate pen, pencil, felt-pip or paint brush and you can vary the nib thickness and colour making it altogether rather versatile. The buttons on the pen let you swap between write and erase. There’s no slot for the stylus – lose it and you are looking at £48 for a new one – but included with the Flyer is a rather smart wallet that has a pen-holder stitched to it.
Home screen and transition
Highlighting pages with the Stock browser's pen menu and tabs. Viewing the Watch film service – a bit pricey though
Front and rear cameras come in at 1.3 and 5Mp, respectively. The former is mounted above the screen when the device is held in landscape, but since the Flyer runs Android 2.3.3, rather than 2.3.4, you can’t use the webcam to take advantage of Google Talk’s recently announced support of video chat. Qik worked a treat though, so it’s not the end of the world.
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COMMENTS
Way too much money
Cut the price in half and it starts to look like good value. At £480 for wifi only it is stupid expensive and is doomed.
Hmmm
I am sure if you can afford it, it will leave you in a blissful state of post Metrosexual wank-spasm.
Anecdotally confirmed
I was on a flight back from NZ with an iPad, via Thailand. I managed to get through 5 of the six parts of the SE version of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and about an hour into the final part before we were coming into land at London. During the brief stopover at Thailand, I did a bit of e-mail and web browsing over a 2G SIM (no 3G there) for about half an hour. I also spent around an hour listening to music when I was trying to get some sleep.
Both were night flights and obviously while in the plane the iPad was in flight mode. The backlight was turned low - about 25% - since the plane was dark anyway. Nonetheless, sitting there watching movies, listening to music and with the half hour non-flight-mode 2G session, I must have used at least 12 hours of battery. According to the meter there was still 15% charge left when I turned it off for landing and IME the battery indicator is fairly linear and accurate in its behaviour.
That's the closest to a continuous playback stress test I've put it through. Even so, heavy use since I got it last year has drilled home one thing that's the stand-out feature of the device for me, as someone who hates having to keep charging things: The iPad battery life is absolutely outstanding. It can be completely relied upon to last a full day without charge under heavy use.
Nope
The bottom line is this is a toy and you have to draw a line somewhere. Very few people actually "need" a device like this. People often conflate "want" with "need".
Bullying HTC into paying you because you failed at selling your own product is unconscionable.
I will never "need" anything enough to be enabler for that behaviour.
RE: Why is it muppetry?
But let's say, hypothetically, that the Flyer happens to be the device that meets your needs perfectly. Isn't avoiding it so MS don't get $5 a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face?
