Gadgetory

hey what is going on everybody I'm the Kravitz from TechnoBuffalo calm and you know this whole tablet computing revolution when I really think about what a good use for a tablet is this is what I think about its first thing in the morning I head outside to the porch a cup of coffee tablet catch up on what I need to get caught up on before I get into the thick of the day check email read some RSS feeds read some web pages you know maybe do a little video chat conversation with one of my colleagues just to kind of you know do it a little morning check in and talk to John maybe talk to Sean see what's going on today what we need to cover and the fun thing about a tablet is in theory you can do all this stuff almost anywhere it's even more portable than a laptop but you know a little bigger a little more functionality than a smartphone one of my favorite tablets of this year or when I first saw it at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was the HTC Flyer now that I've had the Wi-Fi only version for about a week now along with the magic pen it's still my favorite let's find out all right so here's the HTC Flyer the tablet it's available right now through Best Buy the Wi-Fi only version which is the one I have here 16 gigs of internal storage it's 499 dollars no contract it's not through a carrier its Wi-Fi only and then if you want the stylus as well the HTC scribe active stylus pen here this is an additional 80 it's $79.99 so if you buy the two things together you're looking at five hundred eighty dollars plus tax depending on where you live out here in California that's a ton but you're looking at six hundred a little bit more than six hundred dollars for the package which you know is competitive with tablets but also kind of expensive actually a little bit more than some of the comparable tablets and certainly for a seven-inch tablet you know a little bit on the pricey side now carrier versions will be coming out all but certainly the first carrier version will be on Sprint the HTC EVO view no pricing or ship date has officially been set yet but I'm hearing late June probably June 24th and I'm also hearing that Sprint will probably package the stylus in with the device so I don't know what they'll sell it for but you figure you know competitively probably around four hundred maybe five hundred dollars on contract with the stylus included so after having used the device for a few weeks you know what I think of it is a couple of things I think it works really really well I think they should see issues you need a bang-up job on the design and the implementation I think actually that you know for the basic software the basic functionality using Gingerbread as opposed to honeycomb you're not really losing anything and I actually think you might actually be gaining something here because the honeycomb tablets that I've tried so far they work well but you know there's not a lot of polish on them not a lot of customizations yet you know it's sort of it's the first generation of products and you know some of them have you know 3.1 isn't quite out yet and that sort of thing and so you kind of get what you get with those which is um you know sort of a brand new experience with a lot of potential but you know still a lot of things coming you know even things like resizable widgets on the home screen are coming in 3.1 but they're not available for most of the tablets out there yet the zoom you can get two three update it said there's a lot that's coming on the other hand the two decks platform has been out for a while HTC's certainly been working working on it and doing a lot of customizations to it and they've taken their game to a new level here with the new version of sense and you know just really done a nice job not just with the widgets and the 3d effects here on the carousel and that sort of thing but also with little things like the new launch bar on the bottom where you can you know have your shortcuts to your to your apps that you use frequently into the app launcher little things like on the browser if we go back to the home screen here and go to the Internet and we'll see on the browser when you pull down the notifications bar you have not just you know your notifications but you also have and this isn't just in the browser bin the notifications bar you know shortcuts to your most recently used apps shortcuts to quick settings things like that that just kind of increase the productivity on the slightly larger display of the tablet it's a 7 inch display 1024 by 600 and those things work in in portrait mode as well going back to the browser you know a nice little thing here if you hit the windows button you've got you know thumbnail view of your windows and you can easily add a new window and now you go back and you can get an overview of what's in each window and you know sort of like tab browsing you know just little things there that that really just you know when you're when you're working on a platform you've been working on for a while you can continue to refine as opposed to having to go you know jumping to honeycomb and immediately sort of not starting entirely from scratch but definitely starting from scratch in some ways because there are things on honeycomb like the placement of you know the home and back virtual buttons you know in different apps aren't consistent things like that and so I think HTC was wise to stick with what they've been doing for a while and there is a honeycomb version of flower you know they will be upgrading it now the downside is that you don't get access to all of the tablet optimized apps that are out there for honeycomb devices so you're looking at using apps that were built you know basically built for smartphones and then the first generation of Android tablets that are really running you know what Google is said is not a tablet optimized platform so you know there's definitely a trade-off there but again HTC has said that they will be upgrading the flyer to honeycomb at some point so you are a little bit future proofed in that regard as for the device itself whether or not you want to use a 7-inch tablet it's definitely a matter of personal preference one thing I am a little disappointed with and having the flyer you know around to use for a while especially in comparison to some of the other devices it's a little bit heavy and it's not a deal-breaker and it feels really solid the aluminum unibody construction I mean it's fantastic the device you know whether or not you like the gray and white is a matter of style but the device is very well made it looks and feels great the use here of the aluminum back with these rubber grips and the top and bottom is really nice because when you switch from portrait to landscape mode you know you can grip onto these contoured kind of plastic rubber panels there which is kind of a nice touch and and the thing feels solid and it's tough I was talking to James Kendrick why do the good to go show with we're talking about the device and how he dropped I believe it was him we said someday I was talking to another reviewer said they dropped there's no problems at all with it it's definitely built well built you know to step up from the plastic tablets that we're seeing from other companies but the trade-off is that it's heavier and it's noticeably heavier it's heavier you know I picked this up and then I pick up the Barnes and Noble Nook color which is a similarly sized device and I noticed how much lighter than of colors or I pick this up and then I pick up the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 which is a 10-inch screen device and I feel like the Galaxy Tab is lighter as well so you know I definitely that's that's something that the more I've used this I've been a little bit disappointed just in that it does feel heavy that said you know again it's not a deal-breaker at all and I think you get used to a pretty quick and it's still light enough to use for one-handed reading it's just you know not the lightest 7 inch tablet or lightest tablet out there for sure performance has been great the 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon processor you know forget to talk about dual core single core whatever it's been plenty fine 1080p videos they're just a little tiny bit you know but web browsing page rendering all that kind of stuff works really well you know the accelerometer kicks in you know no real problems in terms of performance on the device the cameras it's got front and back cameras the cameras a little bit of a disappointment but most tablets are like that these days for sure getting into some of the you know so overall not to gloss over the stuff but overall the the performance of the device has been great and you know pushing it's a slightly smaller screen 1024 by 600 means less pixels to push which means you know it it's a little bit a little bit easier on the processor we're looking at the HTC watch service now and I'll preview a trailer here this is over Wi-Fi right now HTC watch is another online media store the performance isn't pretty good you know you can rent movies competitively price you know three four or five dollars for a rental you can play them on the screen the playback looks good it's not HD it's it's 600 pixels tall but then you can also output the movies via DLNA to a DLNA equipped device so you know wires wirelessly streaming over Wi-Fi and watching the big screens that kind of thing it's a nice system but frankly you know how many it we're starting to get in this fragmentation with the media stores smart investment of HTC's part 2 you know to invest in a company and now you know you can buy and rent movies directly from ECC and they get the revenue but you know as of right now it's pretty limited in terms of you know how much stuff is in there and do we really need another media store and you know would we rather instead see something like a connection to HTC's I mean to Amazon's media store because you've got the Amazon mp3 player in here and you can upgrade to use the Amazon lock or the cloud player so you know wouldn't it be kind of better to hook into that player for video content from Amazon who's already got a huge library but that might be coming anyway you've got your you're connected media which I was alluding to which is where you can shoot you music videos and photos out to a nearby connected player over over DLNA so there I've got some camera shots there was the one I took of James now we're talking about the tablet the flyer I'm not our last good to go show so I'm searching and I don't think I have anything connected right now so it's not gonna yeah the HTC Flyer is the only thing I've got right now so it'll just play it on the device but if you have a DLNA device you can use that otherwise we've got snap booth which is a a little kind of Apple photo booth type app for I don't mean to compared to Apple but yeah they they have it out there so whatever it's a little front-facing camera app just kind of fun you know some other little stuff like that you've got the e-reader and this looking into talking about the pen which is what I want to talk about so you write your e-reader in here