First Look review: HTC Flyer tablet with stylus option

The new HTC Flyer tablet computer ($500) offers a stylus as an option: Letting you type and navigate with fingers but also write and draw, the stylus lends fun and productive functionality to the table, but an $80 premium.

Here are my first impressions of the tablet and its optional stylus.

The tablet. The silver-and-white Flyer is a 7-inch tablet that weighs just under a pound. It's comfortable to hold, not boxy in shape like some other tablets. The Flyer has 16GB of memory and a memory-card slot for more. You'll find a front- and a rear-facing camera and two speakers on the back of the tablet. The display is a capacitive touchscreen with 1024x600 resolution.

The Flyer is available only with Wi-Fi for now. It uses a standard called MHL for streaming video to your high-def TV. You'll need an additional special adapter to do so, though—and no clear explanation of what's required was included with the tablet's documentation.

The Flyer's operating system is Android 2.3, with HTC's Sense user interface. One small but fun detail is "weather wallpaper," which uses the full screen with animated real-time weather images; on a recent foggy day, it showed a misty forest. The weather is also integrated into the calendar app, providing an animated forecast for several days ahead.

The stylus. It runs on a AAAA battery. Yes, that's four As, and it's a very thin battery that's not always easy to find in stores. One is included with the stylus.

The stylus has two buttons: one for highlighting and the other for erasing. The usual soft buttons are on the bottom of the screen for Home, Menu, and Back, and there's also a Pen button. You can choose the type of pen (or pencil or paintbrush), thickness, and color that you wish to draw or write with.

Among the applications for the stylus is Evernote, a notes app that lets you save Web pages, photos, handwritten notes, and more in searchable notebooks. You can also use the stylus to draw or write on photographs, take notes in books (HTC's reader uses Kobo technology), and more.

Writing with the stylus required some practice. If I leaned my hand in the wrong spot on the tablet, I inadvertently called up the keyboard or went back a page. I also found it sometimes tricky to remember when to use the pen and when to use my finger. After some time, though, I was able to use the stylus without running into these difficulties.

Bottom line. The HTC Flyer's stylus adds a new level of functionality to the tablet. But as an $80 option, it's costly. And there's no way to store it with the tablet (no slot to keep it in, for example), so it's way too easy to lose. The HTC Flyer looks like a capable tablet, but the Samsung Galaxy Tab costs $150 less for a Wi-Fi version with double the built-in storage.

We''ll have full test results for the HTC Flyer in our next batch of tablet Ratings, which are available to subscribers.

—Donna L. Tapellini