Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're taking a closer look at the software on the HTC Flyer from t-mobile so sit back relax and enjoy the show one of the most commented upon items of the HTC Flyer is this home lock screen ring that you have when you turn the device on and you drag the ring up into the center of the screen that's how you unlock it but more importantly is that it gives you the ability to drag icons down into the ring in order to be able to launch apps so if I want to launch calendar I would drag it down here and release and it would launch the calendar app for me and when you have appointments come up then you can drag the dismiss or the snooze icon to that ring as well if you turn it to portrait view then you get the same effect except the ring is you know in the at the bottom of the screen still except you've got the bigger view go ahead and unlock here so this is the HTC sense for the HTC Flyer and you can see with the weather effects there which is pretty typical for HTC products down here across the bottom we've got our launcher bar here with our app launcher the notes feature reader watch and then the personalized button down here and these can be customized as desired if you scroll across then it swipes through the multiple pages and you can see the white icon down here scrolling as well and if you give it a good spin that it spins really fast it rotates around if you pinch into the screen then you can pick the home screen that you want to navigate to now the HTC Flyer is running Gingerbread and they've got able to kind of a custom layout as you can see here oops let's try that again so 2 dot 3 dot 4 and it's running 1 dot 0 of HT sense for tablet now there is talk that this device might actually receive honeycomb but since I extreme sandwich just came out it's more likely that it's going to receive ice cream sandwich before it receives honeycomb and on google+ one of the HTC employees did mention that the HTC Flyer would be on the list for that then again we'll see how that actually pans out when it comes out so starting down here with the notes functionality this is a kind of a custom version of the Evernote application and if you're using the pin tool which I've got here if you tap you can actually use the pin functionality to actually make notes on the screen now because this is running Gingerbread and not honeycomb or ice cream sandwich this pen stylus which will cover a little more in the harbor view doesn't actually work with the rest of the the buttons and the tools if I go up here to attach it doesn't actually work I flip it over and use the metal and here I can get it to do other functionality like tap up here under the title and actually be able to work on it that way but otherwise this just works in the modes such as the note or the screen capture mode which one or rather the kind of the scribble mode which we'll cover in a second has to do with this this button here as far as the pin app is concerned you can tap on the option you tap on the actual pin here and you can change the options such as color and and erase and these that allows you to choose a different pin style so I've got an erase or a highlighter a kind of a purple marker of sorts of being a change of color but it's currently a purple marker a nib pin a brush the standard pin and then hensel really I haven't I haven't found that these a dual really great job of allowing you to write clearly the edges are really grainy and and jittery it for taking a quick note it's fine but for actually factory actual art it's not a very good configuration now in honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich the pin functionality is supposed to work across more apps hopefully we'll be able to see the fun pin functionality work in apps such as sketchbook but for right now the default pin Shin ality is not all that fantastic if we go back here to this the main screen and I tap the pin button which will cover more in the hardware review as well I can go into a scribble mode which takes a capture of the screen as you see it and then you can doodle on the screen or erase by holding down the white button and then save that capture as something else so you could do the same thing with a PDF document you could create your own JPEGs of grid paper and that sort of thing take quick notes with if you wanted to you know screen capture and there's a couple of apps that allow that sort of functionality available in the market but not by default and as you can see here I'm tapping on the discard button but it doesn't actually do anything if I flip it over it will but that's no different than me tapping it with my fingers the reader app is akin to the like a kindle app or the ibookstore in Apple products it is a very straightforward reading application with a page turn animation effect and it flips back and forth very easily you can change things like fonts and brightness and screen res screen settings like the night view and that sort of thing so it actually works pretty well it's kind of HTC's own little reader application you also have the ability to go in and watch videos if you pay for them it's a little bit like Amazon's movie store or the Apple movie store it's just another way for HTC to kind of get some additional funds out of you after you buy a product but really this screen does a pretty good job of displaying video format and we got netflix going on here and it works just fine I actually haven't used purchase any videos or I wasn't able to find any videos that were available for free at first glance we go over here new releases we can see we've got things like Rango and if I tap on this then it gives a buy price of 1499 but there doesn't there's not a rental price listed here for a just an easy view rather than spending the money for a full version another app that a lot of people have a tendency to use right away is these the snap booth app which gives you the ability to take pictures of your face using the front-facing camera or other devices kind of like apples photo booth as well that's a lot of one item that a lot of people as soon as I hand on this device that they have tends to just jump right into when you go into personalized then you have the ability to set the scene which changes some of the buttons and the layouts the skin the wallpaper lock screen add widgets back and forth default the sound sets set alarms that sort of thing the market is actually still the older market version even though it's running Gingerbread some of the other functionality here that's kind of interesting is the dock mode which gives you the ability to if you have a the actual dock for this device and it can launch this mode automatically where you can go and turn on the brightness level you can barely see the clock up here but at night that would be very visible still there's a car dock if you have the carb accessory that gives you the ability to have like destinations and footprints the history of where you've gone marking locations that's sort of information I one item of note here is the press reader which gives you kind of a being able to read newspapers I've got the Los Angeles Times from a couple of days ago loaded here and you can see you can scroll through the newspaper and it's got the articles and then if you tap on the the headline that it takes you into this text mode you can actually read the article without some of the pictures it what I thought was really funny about this is it actually has all of the advertisements if we tap and hold the home button then we get the recent apps as you would expect there is a task manager that allows you to control what apps are running and actually kill all the applications if you so desire to kind of free up some memory there is this connected media piece here which is kind of a DLNA connected device setup they can stream media but it's not exactly like the windows media center connected devices configuration you have to do some little setup to little magic on your own end to make that work in the status bar menu here as you can see here in landscape format we've got a split view here and we can see the most recent apps we can clear the the notification area and then we've got some quick settings over here which allows to toggle on Wi-Fi on and off to talk about the mobile network on and off and actually go into the the full settings very quickly if you switch into landscape mode then down here at the bottom that turns into two different tabs for that functionality overall the OS is very snappy it feels very quick I've had very few crashes although I have had some coming out of an application it'll reload sense is where the crash generally occurs coming specifically out of google reader is where i find it happens the most I'm not exactly sure why Netflix was able to load on here with no problem I was also able to get skype working with video and with audio that wraps up our closer look at the software on the HTC Flyer from t-mobile if you have any questions or comments about the software functionality on this device leaving below and we'll try to cover them thanks for watching hmm