HTC’s market success is based on excellent phones that have better production quality than the competitors, including the “small things” that made their use intuitive and simple. Although they’ve already had their go at the tablet market, HTC Flyer is their first Android-powered attempt at it. As time passed, with competition stiffening, it became clear that HTC was preparing something serious. Have they been able to adapt their smartphone stratagem to tablets sufficiently well? Has the waiting paid off? Does Flyer have something to separate it from the similarly-based competition?
You can tell a tree by the fruit it bears
The first thing to become instantly obvious to us upon opening the packaging is the very nice white carrying bag and an aluminium pen. The bag is made of leather, has an inner coating, as well as magnets that hold the seal tightly when closed, while there a tiny ribbon on the outside for holding the aforementioned pen; we have to admit that it all looks very elegant on the whole. Flyer itself does nothing to negate this impression, as its body is also made of single-cast aluminium. The tablet has a smaller diagonal, which has enabled the device to remain light, regardless of almost exclusively metal body. The back is dominated by the impressed HTC logo, two speakers placed across the width of the device, and a flashless camera. On the side, alongside the white plastic inserts, improving grip and closing the slots for microSD and SIM cards, one can also see the microUSB port, stereo microphone, headphone output and volume and power buttons. Unexpectedly, there’s no HDMI in any form, which means that you’ll have to obtain HDMI output via the MHL adapter, just like the one seen on Galaxy S II, which means that it’ll be a difficult and expensive endeavour. The strangely shaped microUSB port only accepts charger and PC cables from the bundle, despite its being fully compatible with standard microUSB devices. HTC has probably opted for this solution in order to boost sales of their own equipment, such as the charger holder, which will be equipped with the same connector.
The separate LED for light signalisation is gone, and for a good reason, as the clever HTC engineers integrated that functionality into the power button, so that it lights up in various colours depending on the event. Expectedly, the front contains the secondary camera, the small HTC logo and the display. After our experiences with several fresh HTC phones (Desire S, Desire HD), we were a bit afraid of our first encounter with the display, but that fear has turned out to be unjustified. The viewing angles are excellent, there are no coloration shifts, and it’s bright enough to be used comfortably even on a sunny day. The display is protected with a layer of Gorilla glass (extra hard), so you don’t have to worry about scratches and damage all that much. Besides the usual capacitive touch-sensitive layer, there’s an additional one for pen usage, but we’ll delve into detail about that later on.
Powerful
Most serious tablets that we’ve tested lately had an SOC (System On Chip) as the hardware basis, containing a dual-core CPU and a latest-gen graphics card. However, while engineering Flyer, HTC was following the logic that applications able to use the potential of dual-core CPUs are still very few, and that putting a single really fast core was the way to go. Basically, the SOC is the same as already seen on Desire S and Desire HD, but the CPU clock has been increased by 50%. Synthetic tests yielded excellent results, which was reflected in real-world conditions as well - even the most demanding of operations, such as webpage rendering, .mkv file playback or document editing, run perfectly smoothly at all times. There’s no game that can cause a hiccup in this tablet, and with a bit of “hacking”, we were even able to run NVIDIA Tegra-reserved titles on it, with zero artefacts in the process. Two factors have contributed to this sort of performance the most: strong hardware and a lower display resolution compared to the competitors, the latter being forcedly imposed by the reduction in size. The rest of the specs aren’t to be underestimated either, as 1 GB RAM and 32 GB of internal storage space are far from being standard-fare. The internal memory isn’t dynamic, which means that there’s a preset space of 12 GB for installing applications, while the rest can be used for storage. If you find this insufficient, you can always pop in an additional microSD card and expand available storage space.
You can connect to the internet either via Wi-Fi or HSDPA mobile network, as long as the mobile operator supports it. On our internet connection quality test, Flyer has turned out to be great, regardless of the actual type of connection used, with low ping and large data transfer speeds. Although we don’t consider back cameras on larger tablets a prerequisite, Flyer is small enough to make it work, so we had to do a test of that feature as well. The high resolution and strong hardware promised 720p video and good photos, at least in daylight. Unfortunately, both cameras have disappointed us, to the point where they can freely be deemed the worst aspects of this device. Video is recorded in 3GP format, which is very lossy in terms of details, the framerate is low, and the final result is an image full of noise, which seems as if it had been recorded in a far lower resolution and then upscaled. The front camera isn’t all that better either, and since voice/video calls aren’t enabled over the mobile network, its purpose remains a mystery. We’ve tried using it via Gtalk and Skype, though, encountering no issues. All that remains is to hope that HTC will eventually put out a magical update which would improve recording quality, but even then, the cameras would remain the low point of the overall experience.
