1. HTC Flyer
Samsung, HTC, RIM, LG and Motorola are showing off their latest tablet creations at MWC 2011. It's an Android party, and Honeycomb is on the menu.
Soon after we originally published this article, HTC shocked us all with a tablet unveiling. The brand-spanking-new HTC Flyer is a seven-inch tablet, exactly like the BlackBerry PlayBook and Samsung Galaxy Tab, but it will ship this spring (Q2 2011), not with Android 3.0, but with v2.4. Most phones aren't even running 2.3 (Gingerbread) yet, so seeing a jump to 2.4 is quite the surprise. 2.4, like 2.3, will be known as Gingerbread, but it seems like most of the changes between the two flavors are under the hood and the UI is unchanged...much like a Service Pack for Windows, we suppose. Of course this only applies to the "vanilla", or unchanged, Android OS, as the software on the Flyer will be tweaked with HTC's Sense UI.
As for the hardware, the Flyer has a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, a 1.3MP front-facing camera, a 5MP rear camera, and a 1024x600 capacitive touchscreen display. The Flyer will also ship with a stylus that plays nice with the capacitive display.
HTC is including plenty of software goodies with this new piece of hardware, including a new HTC Watch app that acts as a video streamer and an OnLive gaming app.
Why buy a netbook for $300 when you can axe the keyboard and charge twice as much and do half as much with it!
I don't like to see that the manufacturers "tweak" the OS. That probably means you will have problems when you download average programs from the Android marketplace and try to run them. Wouldn't it be better if users got an unmolested version of the OS?
I don't like to see that the manufacturers "tweak" the OS. That probably means you will have problems when you download average programs from the Android marketplace and try to run them. Wouldn't it be better if users got an unmolested version of the OS?
More often than not, the vanilla/unaltered version of Android's UI is going to be better than whatever UI layover is added. That said, HTC's Sense UI is one of the better options (as opposed to Motoblur or TouchWiz). Also, I don't think I've ever heard of a UI layer interfering with an app from the Android Marketplace.
-Devin
For the most part, the "tweaking" is only to the UI. HTC's Sense is by far the best UI version of all the phone makers, AOSP aside. They usually don't interfere with the core Android usage.
That being said, as much as I prefer the vanilla AOSP look, the phone maker's need to be able to alter the UI in some way, to differentiate from each other. It's part of the reason the OS has blossomed so much. If they were simply competing on hardware alone, there wouldn't be nearly as much interest on their part.