The Aztecs invented the wheel, but only used it to make children’s toys. If the Aztecs had invented a tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus, it would look a lot like the HTC Flyer.
In a tablet market crowded with companies trying to knock the iPad from its throne like kids at a carnival dunking booth, the Flyer tries to make a splash with a pressure-sensitive stylus. Without the stylus you have an unexceptional, expensive Android tablet with a 7-inch screen.
Unfortunately, shelling out for the stylus gives you an unexceptional, even more expensive tablet with a pointless gimmick.
Having a pressure-sensitive stylus is important to all sorts of people: artists, graphic artists, commercial artists, um, illustrators, people who draw, human beings who create works of art using lines and color… OK, it’s pretty much just artists. You don’t need a pressure-sensitive pen to write a grocery list or draw a quick map to the nearest brewpub. That’s why rollerball pens outsell Winsor and Newton ink brushes.
So of course they’re going to put enormous effort into making it useful for professional artists, or at least aspiring professionals, right?
Apparently not. It’s as if the Director of Directing Directions stood in front of the development team and said, “OK, we have to innovate here! I want us to make a drawing device that’s of almost no use to artists! Brainstorm! Go!”
“What if you could only draw in eight pre-chosen colors?”
“Great, Hendrickson! Brilliant! Anyone else?”
“Ooh! Only give them seven drawing tools to choose from! And one of them’s the eraser!”
“Nice, I like it. But it needs something.”
“Um…oh! All of the drawing tools use some sort of half-assed ‘natural texture’ so you can’t draw a clean black line!”
“Ah, great, that’s brilliant! Style over substance, that’s what I like to see. How about you, Fleming? You’ve been pretty quiet.”
“What if … ”
“Yes, yes, spit it out, we haven’t got all day.”
“What if it didn’t come with a drawing app?”
“I … what?”
“Don’t bundle a dedicated drawing app, with layers and flood fill and other things artists need. Instead, just have them draw on the standard Notepad! And, of course, none of the drawing apps in the Android Market will work with our stylus! It’ll be maddening!”
“Fleming, you’ve got a real future in this company.”
Now, to be fair, they did their best to make the stylus useless for non-artists as well. For instance — and I want you to pay close attention here — you can’t use the stylus as a pointing device. You have the stylus in your hand, you’re ready to go, but you can’t use it to click on buttons, icons, or input fields.
“Pen is for drawing,” explains the tutorial. “Tap the button with your finger to continue.”
So you have to keep the stylus ready, but not actually use it until you want to draw something. Better yet, there’s no stylus holder built into the device. I guess you keep it tucked behind your ear like a diner waitress from the ’40s.
And what if you don’t buy the stylus? You save $80, and you get a middle-of-the-road 7-inch tablet for $500. With a 1.5-Ghz processor, 1 GB of internal RAM and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, it’s notably more powerful than the current Wi-Fi-only Galaxy Tab, but costs $150 more. The Wi-Fi Motorola Xoom has a faster processor, a bigger screen — if you like that sort of thing — and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera to the Flyer’s 1.3 megapixel camera, and costs $100 more. If you’re set on a 7-inch Android tablet and better specs are worth the money to you, the Flyer’s worth looking at.
The tragic thing about the Flyer’s stylus is that it’s potentially just a software update away from actually being useful. It’s reasonably sensitive and well-constructed, so a well-written app could transform it from a toy to a tool overnight. But until then, there’s not much reason to buy it, and if nobody buys it, it might not be worth it for app developers to support the stylus. Meanwhile, digital artists everywhere continue to await the drawing tablet of their dreams.
WIRED Full-featured, if not very powerful. Pleasant interface as long as you don’t use the stylus.
TIRED Not particularly fast or particularly cheap. Runs Android 2.2, not 3.1, at least until HTC delivers the promised update. Stylus is a frivolous gimmick.
Photo by Lore Sjöberg