HTC Flyer

It won’t kill the iPad, but this is the best Android tablet around

It won’t kill the iPad, but this is the best Android tablet around

Not another Android tablet, you say. This one, though, is well worth a look, especially if you don’t want an Apple product. Its USP is that it has a stylus—something that even the iPad has not incorporated.

While it sounds impressive, when I first saw it I was shocked. It’s fat. And though it is made of aluminium, it is heavy for its size. But when I switched it on, I was pleasantly surprised. The Flyer runs fast. The resolution on its 7 inch display won’t excite you, but HTC’s Sense user interface will.

I am happy with what HTC has done with Android. It is not the latest version, but it works very well and its screen changes are very smooth—though not as good as the iPad’s. It is surely the smoothest that I have seen in the Android world.

And then there is the stylus. The PDA generation worked hard to master the stylus, but that skill became obsolete once multi-touch tablets came in. All those people can rejoice now—because this tablet has an application that lets you draw and make notes with a stylus.

It has some other nice apps too, such as HTC Notes and Weather. You can also use the stylus to mark-up web pages, highlight text and sign your documents on the tablet itself. All your highlights and annotations are collated in the end, and notes can be recorded in voice too—in case you are too tired to use the stylus.

I have mixed feelings about its camera. The photos are good only for online sharing. I would have loved high-resolution images that I could annotate with the stylus—but, alas.  

Yet, the Flyer is a top-notch gadget and is priced right. Just don’t compare it with an iPad and don’t worry about the dated Android version. It works well and HTC has a winner here.

Android tabletcomputerHTC