The HTC Flyer: the stylus and back, and how!

Last week at MWC, HTC presented their take on an Android tablet, called the HTC Flyer. The Flyer is a 7 inch slate with a1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 1024×600 pixels capacitive multitouch display, 1 GB of RAM and camera’s on the font and back. All in all this does not sound that incredible or differentiating from any other tablets out there. Especially when I heard that this will first launch with Android 2.3 instead of the all new tablet specific Honeycomb.

However, all these specs aside, HTC has made the Flyer into something unique on the tablet market right now by including their new Scribe technology. This technology means that the screen has 2 digitizers. It can recognize finger input, but it can also register input from a pressure sensitive capacitive stylus. This reminded me instantly of the Microsoft Courier tablet concept which we saw about a year ago. With the new stylus, you can actually draw over each screen of the HTC Flyer and save it as a note or share it with the world. Imagine reading a PDF on the Flyer and having the possibility to takes notes with your stylus and save it or send it. You can do the same with websites or images.

This tablet is the first tablet which I can imagine works great in a classroom for taking notes. Taking notes on a tablet without a stylus just does not work, because you have to type. This makes it slow and unintuitive, you can’t draw or make connections between notes, which is basically all the functionality that you want to have on a note-taking tablet. HTC has included some nice software which lets you easily take, store and share notes. They also have a great sketching program on the Flyer, which lets you select different brushed, colors and effects. Lets just hope HTC and other parties develop more applications that take advantage of stylus input and I can really see a future again for the stylus. Check out the video below for a demonstration of the Flyer.