Review: HTC Flyer

HTC’s Flyer is a 7in tablet device, running the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, overlaid with HTC's Sense graphics user interface. It was launched in May.

We reviewed a 32GB model priced at about £550 + VAT, but there is a cheaper 16GB model costing about £480 + VAT (SIM-free). Both models have 3G mobile and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The device weighs in at 426g, and has dimensions of 195 x 122 x 13mm. The front of the Flyer has a black screen bezel housing a 1.3-megapixel camera halfway up on the right hand side. The screen bezel is framed by an anodised aluminium housing, except on the top of the device where the framing sees a white plastic fascia extending over the back top quarter of the device [see picture].

The back is anodised aluminium, capped at the ends by the white plastic fascia mentioned above, and a smaller one at the bottom housing the micro-USB 2.0 port.

The Flyer comes with a white leather-like pouch, which soon gets dirty, and has a touch screen stylus housed in an external holder at the side [see picture].

Specifications
Our HTC Flyer was running v2.3.3 of the Android OS (known as Gingerbread), running in conjunction with HTC's Sense user interface (v2.1).

The Flyer is powered by a Qualcomm SnapDragon 1.5GHz single core processor and can support a maximum of 1GB of system memory, which both Flyer models have as standard. The graphics subsystem is an embedded Qualcomm Adreno GPU running the screen at a native resolution of 1024 x 600.

Connections on the Flyer are limited to a micro-USB 2.0 slot for connecting the AC adaptor or a micro-USB-to-standard USB connector, and an audio headphone jack.

There are two silver volume control buttons on the top right-hand side of the Flyer (when held in landscape mode), and the on/off switch is located at the right-hand side near the top of the device.

Network connectivity
There are four types of network connections available on the Flyer – an internal GPS antenna, wireless connectivity through IEEE 802.11b/g/n hardware, Bluetooth v3.0, and users can insert a SIM card to get mobile access.

In use

Fire-up the Flyer and the first screen you'll see is one showing this [see picture].

The touch screen is very responsive and performed well during the review, and the Android OS makes it easy to quickly traverse applications.

The pen stylus made it easy to draw and write on the screen, but that's all you'll be using it for, because you can't use it to click on the touch screen for navigating through applications, which was annoying.

Unfortunately there was no SIM on our review unit, but if you have a SIM-card, the Flyer supports the HSPA+ standard, and the earlier High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile data transfer protocols.

So providing you’re in metropolitan areas, you should have decent upload and download speeds – for example 2Mbit/s on the download link and 600Kbit/s on the upload link.

We also clipped in a 2GB micro-SD card in the slot next to where the SIM-card should be inserted [see picture].

We downloaded HTC Sync from the HTC support site, and installed the package on our Labs Dell Optiplex 980 system, which took about three minutes.

We then fired up the software, connected the HTC Flyer to the Dell system using the micro-USB cable, and within a minute we could easily synchronise documents, contacts, calendar and task information from the PC to the Flyer [see picture].

Using Windows Explorer you can also manually copy data from the micro-SD card to your computer over the cable.

Athough we could connect to a work Wi-Fi network, we did have problems connecting to the wireless network on our residential Wi-Fi network.

The work network used a Netgear DG834N wireless router while our residential Wi-Fi network used a Thomson SpeedTouch 580 Wireless ADSL modem/router from our ISP BE Broadband.

This may be a problem specific to Android devices since all our Windows and Linux systems could connect easily to our residential Wi-Fi connection, but another Android device, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer also could not connect to this Wi-Fi connection.

Users can also use the USB cable to connect to a PC and share that internet connection and the Flyer can also share its 3G connection between PCs or other tablets for web access.

The Flyer's Bluetooth network connection can be used to pair and connect with other Bluetooth devices, although not with all – as trying to connect to our Samsung SGH E250 phone showed – and users should check that their mobile phones or other Bluetooth devices are supported.

For Office productivity, the Flyer has the Polaris Office productivity software installed, and this does give compatibility with even the latest Microsoft Office package – version 2010.

The build quality of the Flyer was not up to Apple iPad or Asus Transformer standards, even though it had the look and feel of a smaller version of the iPad.

The clips that attach the fascia to the main body of the Flyer look particularly vulnerable, although users probably won't be continually opening the back up, especially once they've fitted the SIM and a micro-SD card.

The speakers were not the best we've heard on a device of this size; the BlackBerry PlayBook and Asus Transformer speakers gave much better sound quality in our opinion.

Battery life

The Flyer has a lithium-ion battery rated at 4Ah, and we estimated the Flyer's battery life as about 9.5 hours when we were actually using it, although this was with very light usage [see picture].

More intense usage like watching media clips, or data transfer over 3G and/or Wi-Fi connections would shorten this significantly.

Users can improve that battery life by checking which feature is using the battery most and modifying that feature's behaviour, like setting shorter timeouts or turning off said feature. With our Flyer, the display itself and having the device's 3G connection on standby appeared to be the major battery drain [see picture].

Charging the Flyer from zero to about 99 per cent capacity took about three hours.

Conclusions
The HTC Flyer is a good size and highly portable, but you might struggle to get it into a jacket pocket.

While it is great for viewing content, you'll need a keyboard if you're editing long documents with Polaris Office, although the onboard software keyboard is accurate, if slightly slow for text input.

The user interface was easy to use, and battery life is good considering the size of the battery.