I've been using my HTC Flyer for about a good two years now, and I'm completely satisfied with it. Hardware's quite dated, of course, so you may experience a few quibbles here and there should you decide to get one now. Here's what it's like to own one:
The good stuff:
- You will love the build quality. It's nice and sturdy, has a reassuring amount of heft, and it's just plain beautiful, even by today's standards. Even after years of use, the white still hasn't faded, and with a fair amount of caution and proper use, scratches are not an issue whatsoever. The way it's built I think it could last a decade.
- Has a MicroSD card slot. If you plan to consume a fair amount of media on your tablet, this is great.
- Has a very good screen (considering when it was made). Colors are bright and punchy, and is overall a pleasure to use.
- Speakers are actually pretty okay. Not mind-blowing, but they're not crap.
- HTC's keyboard is very good. I've used it to take extensive notes very quickly during meetings and public engagements. I even think that the Flyer's keyboard is much better than the stock keyboard on my Xperia Z.
- The 5MP camera is surprisingly good, even by today's standards. I don't like the idea of using a tablet for shooting photos / videos, but on more than one occasion I've had to make do. For 5MPs, it takes some surprisingly good outdoor photos and is decent enough indoors with enough light; video quality is also good. In fact, I was able to produce better-looking photos with the Flyer than I did with my 2012 Xperia Sola, which itself had a 5MP camera.
- Newer games that I thought would kill this tablet actually play fairly well. I use the Flyer to play stuff from Candy Crush Saga, the Sonic platformers, Cytus, Pitfall, stuff like that.
- It even comes with a nice, white, leather cover/sleeve out of the box. You'll need to use leather cleaner after a few months on it, as expected.
Some stuff that may be of concern:
- This is of course, an older tablet with dated hardware. Single CPU, 512 MB of RAM, if I remember right. That means that when using some pretty hefty programs, you will experience some stutters and lag. A good example here is when you try to draw on Skitch for extended periods of time, or play more hardware-demanding games.
- Using a third-party keyboard may cause certain apps to slow down. It's odd, but it happens. Swiftkey Tablet doesn't play well with longer notes on Evernote. Kii keyboard works well, but only 90% of the time. (But that shouldn't be too much of a problem, as I've mentioned HTC's keyboard is actually pretty good).
- The screen isn't as good as what you can get on similar tablets today. This is a pretty big thing you should think about. It's a matter of pixel density - for example, it's been reported that the new Nexus 7 displays text so crisply that a PDF'd magazine like, say a Wired or Esquire is readable without having to zoom in on it. I have a lot of magazines I've bought on Zinio that I need to do the zoom-in, zoom-out dance with as I read through the pages.
- It can't play some HD Video files. It will play some, not all, even with programs such as MX video player.
- The stylus uses an AAAA battery. Depending on where you are, that's pretty hard to come by (at least for me). The stylus comes with the tablet (again, may depend where you get it from), and is necessary to be able to use HTC Scribe features (like their proprietary annotation stuff, screenshots, and a few other minor things).
- HTC doesn't seem to be planning any more software updates for the Flyer. So right now, it's locked on Honeycomb (3.2). Some folks on XDA have run ICS on it, but it seems to be a bit more work than I could be bothered with.
I use my Flyer mainly for reading (Feedly, Pocket, Zinio, Repligo Reader), watching videos (Youtube, MX Player), leisurely browsing (Firefox; the stock browser has not aged well), and note-taking (Evernote; the included HTC Notes program used to be really good at the beginning, but has since developed inconsistencies syncing with Evernote). The Flyer also has no problem running the more popular casual games, and then some. For these purposes the Flyer still does a fine job, and I could see myself getting a year or even two more of use from this thing, if I weren't planning on getting a new tablet.
If you can live with the above pros and cons and the price really is dirt cheap, I guess you could consider it. If I were in you place, though, I'd consider looking at even the ASUS MemoPad 7. Less expensive than even the Nexus 7, but you get current-gen hardware that performs very well, considering its price; I think it would be worth it.
Also, there are some rumors that HTC may be planning some new tablets come late 2013 or 2014. Who knows.
Edit: Forgot to say something about
battery life: it's pretty good. Moderate use, say a few hours of reading, an hour of gaming, an hour of browsing and a few short videos, It can last up to two days before needing to be charged. It's pretty good. Heavy usage - more than an hour of gaming and more than an hour of videos, it'll still last a whole day before needing to be charged. I'm quite happy with the Flyer's battery life. (Note: I disabled the display's brightness auto-adjust feature, and just keep the brightness locked at a nice 30%-40%).
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