Like every other 7-inch Android tablet, HTC's Flyer is essentially a very big phone. It even looks slightly phonier than the rest. But it might be the nicest oversized phone-tablet yet.
Like previous 7-inch Android tablets, it's not running Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Instead, it's running Android Gingerbread with HTC's Sense software slicked over the top for widgets and a nifty 3D homescreen.
Mixed with a few new software features to make it more it tablet-y is OnLive's cloud-based streaming game service (last seen on the iPad and Vizio TVs). The idea behind OnLive is that you can play console games anywhere. The Flyer is promising to be the first tablet to have true OnLive support, so you can play console games on the tablet or "pipe the OnLive service through the HTC Flyer tablet's broadband wireless" to your TV. Hopefully, it's good.
I'm still not sure about using styluses with tablets (unless you're cranking out the artworks faster than you can paint), but HTC's bundling the Flyer with a stylus and has new "Scribe technology" for recognizing hand-writing (and allowing you to draw pictures of horses, or whatever it is you can't do with a pen and paper). And the Timemark feature lets you record audio which is saved alongside the notes for later use. Tapping a word within the notes will automatically play that relevant recording.
The main reason it's probably the nicest Android tablet yet? That aluminum unibody. The screen is a thoroughly standard 7-inch, 1024 x 600 LCD, with a 1.3MP camera strapped onto the front, and a 5MP one on the back. Inside, it's running a 1.5GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage (expandable through the microSD card slot). Right now, it's got HSPA+ connectivity (think AT&T or T-Mobile) but that doesn't mean they won't have a version for Sprint or Verizon.
If you've read this far and were already imagining yourself watching videos on this thing the whole way from New York to China, think again—the battery can only handle four hours of video playback, though the standby time is listed as up to a whopping 1470 hours—that's 61 days. Playtime is obviously a lot less. HTC's not talking pricing but it's probably not cheaper than what Samsung or Dell are asking for their tablets—so think $450 and up.
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