Engadget has a review of the N-Trig equipped HTC Flyer. Here’s their take on the inking functionality. Head over for their full review:
We’ll readily admit we’re not as practiced at using pens as we are with keyboards, but writing on the Flyer was significantly harder than using a real ink diffuser. Our letters were about twice the size as on real paper and approximately five times as ugly. We encountered similar difficulty when trying to accurately plot a course on a Scribble of Google Maps — it was just too hard to stay within the lines.
So, the Magic Pen isn’t all that hot on intricate detail, but if you decide to use it as a fast and loose accessory to the rest of your work on the Flyer, you’ll likely be very well rewarded. It’s weirdly addictive to add doodles and annotations, whether to webpages or images captured with the tablet’s camera, and we found ourselves spending lengthy sessions trying out the pressure sensitivity (not a wide range by any means), different nub size and shape options, and color variations. On the whole, input recognition works very well and we recognize a bunch of uses that it can be put to, both practical and farcial, but HTC will need to step up its game and introduce more in the way of pen-friendly software. One note-taking app will not bring the stylus revolution about by itself.
I’m looking forward to running it through my own review and seeing how natural the experience is. I have a feeling that a lack of integrated ink note-taking apps like Evernote will be the Flyer’s Achilles’s heel. Taking handwritten notes is one thing. Having them available is another.
I understand though that the notes app in the Flyer will sync with Evernote. I am hoping it is a real sync but even if only sending handwritten notes automatically into evernote it will be quite useful to me.
That would be good if true. I’d still like to see the support within the app, though.
Like tablet PC Market, Android will certainly have problem to find specific applications to use pen, even if HTC Flyer stay the only Tablet with Digital pen.
The Android OS isn’t optimised to use pen, like Windows XP was with it’s specific release Tablet PC Edition.
The Microsoft Research and Development inside Tablet PC Components is not, in the near future (3 / 5 years), going to be integrated or reproduce in another major Mobile OS. Or it will be a Microsoft OS (Hope With Windows 8 ARM)