Remember the days of losing styluses when our mobile devices were all on resistive touchscreens? Sure, fingertips could work, but the precision isn"t there - plus the slight risk of scratching. Thankfully the era of styluses is mostly behind us with the emergence of capacitive touchscreens, save for a few limited applications where styluses are preferred. But we still have the problem of precision for tablets and smartphones - for instance, how could one use a tablet as a pseudo-notepad?
And that"s where HTC comes in to address this problem. They take the fast responsiveness of a capacitive touchscreen, and the resistive properties in e-ink displays, and combines them together with a "magic pen" for their new HTC Flyer tablet. However, their solution is definitely one stylus you must not lose - it comes in at a hefty $80. $80 just for a stylus on steroids! Fortunately it"s an optional accessory, as Wired notes.
The pen is part of HTC"s Scribe technology that HTC terms with a catchphrase in their presentation video for the Flyer: "If you can see it, you can write on it." The pen allows for users to quickly create invitations for events, annotate documents and notes with virtual pens and highlighters, digitally sign documents, and of course doodling on your own personal photos as children would.
Some people may find the stylus a bit hard to justify, moreso if they also consider the stylus + leather case combination for $110 which at least allows for a place to store the pen-sized stylus in. $110 worth of accessories may be much for a $500 tablet, but HTC hopes this will differentiate its newest baby in an increasingly overcrowded tablet market, as the HTC Flyer carries most of the standard specs one comes to expect from an Android tablet: a beefy 1.5 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rear facing camera, a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera, stereo speakers, and of course Flash support.
A demonstration of the Flyer may be seen below.
Image Credit: Wired
