We’ve recently had the chance to play with a HTC Flyer unit and we were pretty impressed by the way things look on the device. Considering that this not a Honeycomb tablet, it handles the UI side admirably. The unboxing went down here and now it’s time for the full review:
HTC Flyer measures 13.2 mm in thickness and weighs 420 grams, so it’s much lighter than the iPad 2. This model was announced back at Mobile World Congress 2011 and it’s a premiere: the first HTC tablet and the first tablet with Gingerbread/Sense. Upfront there’s a 7 inch touchscreen on this unit, with a 1024 x 600 pixels, while the Sense 3.0 UI is kept in motion by a 1.5GHz CPU (single core).
The slate comes with stereo speakers, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus at the back and a front 1.3 megapixel camera. Sadly, you can’t do video calls with this model, or phone calls for that matter, since there’s no dialer. That’s pretty strange, considering event the first Galaxy Tab could do that. Well, at least you can do texting…
We tested the 32GB WiFi 3G unit of the Flyer, that packs 1GB of RAM and a microSD card slot, plus a microUSB port. We couldn’t shake the feeling that this is in fact a bigger HTC Sensation, having seen that smartphone upclose not so long ago. Video playback on this unit looks great and the audio experience is impressive, with the dual speakers giving out a clear and loud playback.
The Internet browser is easy to use, places tabs at the top and loads flash element fast. I’d take this over the Honeycomb browser any day, to be honest and there’s no reason to go with Firefox, either. There’s also a Snapbooth app on board to have fun with, similar to the camera effects on the iPad 2 and digitally deforming the face of the user.
You can customize most aspects of the look and feel of the OS, including lockscreen, wallpapers, skins and you can add widgets, such as the News feed one, the Friend Stream, the one that shows you the books you can read and a nice gallery. The dock of the bottom doesn’t include the classic phone call and texting features, but instead you get Notes, Reading, HTC Watch, Settings and Apps.
The capacitive buttons that are classic for Android are placed at the bottom of the display and they light up in landscape as well, when you turn the tablet around. You can find out more details in the full review below:
