The smartphone (HTC G7) I bought half a year ago got lost a few days ago, and the Xiaomi phone still hadn’t come out, so I had no choice but to find another way… and that’s how I ended up with this HTC Flyer.
I hadn’t originally planned to buy a tablet so early. I was biding my time, waiting for the open-source release of Android 3.X, or for Amazon to make some new move with a tablet or reader, and I was also keeping an eye on Asus’s new models—Asus’s Eeepad sits somewhere between a tablet and a laptop. If my phone had still been around, I would have been more likely to consider this kind of tablet that could partially replace a notebook computer, or else to buy an e-reader. But now that I had just lost my phone, getting a tablet in advance while buying a new phone turned out to be the better plan. I thought about Samsung’s famous brick-like handset, but I’ve never had a very good impression of it. Fortunately, while browsing the market I found HTC’s newly released Flyer, which was said to be able to make calls too, priced at 4,000 yuan, so I decisively bought it. After all, these days there still aren’t many tablets that can take a SIM card and make calls, and the room for choice isn’t that large; otherwise I’d have to settle for a knockoff brand.
I had also had a little prior knowledge of HTC’s Flyer, and my basic impression was that its positioning was extremely odd—it was neither dual-core, nor did it run Android 3.X (it’s 2.3), and basically it was just an oversized phone. Under normal circumstances I would never have considered it; however, wasn’t I here to buy a phone right now? Compared with the genuine G7 I had bought for 3,900 yuan back then, a price tag of 4,000 was acceptable. If I weren’t considering a tablet this time, I was planning to buy an HTCSensation or Pyramid, and even gray-market units would cost over 3,000 yuan. In that case, it would be better to kill two birds with one stone and solve the tablet need at the same time~
The most crucial innovation in buying the Flyer under such fortuitous circumstances is the return of the stylus. Of course, the stylus was not HTC’s invention. Early so-called touch screens could already be used with a stylus, but ever since Apple redefined “touch,” smart phones equipped with capacitive screens basically stopped using styluses. Besides, adding an electromagnetic pen to a capacitive screen was not HTC’s creation either; styluses designed for capacitive screens had long existed (though they generally weren’t that easy to use), and in China there is also Lenovo’s “E人E本,” which made original handwriting its calling card.
But unlike ordinary add-on capacitive pens, HTC’s tablet, like E人E本, has software that has been specially adapted for the stylus. Yet the adaptation on E人E本 is very unsatisfactory: in effect, it abandons “touch” again and becomes operable only with an electromagnetic pen. Although it introduces the Android system on the software side, on the issue of “touch” it is in some sense a regression; moreover, it is precisely targeted at high-end businesspeople, which seems to be walking back onto BlackBerry’s old road.
By contrast, HTC Flyer adds this pen on the basis of completely preserving touch-screen functionality, but its functions are not merely 1+1=2, either. Take E人E本: the functions it loudly promotes may seem appealing, but they amount to nothing more than a somewhat more advanced replacement for the traditional paper notebook. Flyer is different. The key is that when it simultaneously preserves finger touch and the electromagnetic pen, the two are distinguished from one another. In other words, in Flyer, the finger does not replace the pen’s function, and the pen does not replace the finger’s function. The finger is for operation and control, while the pen is for writing and recording—on a certain interface, tapping or dragging with a finger performs the corresponding operation (for example, turning pages), whereas drawing across the screen with the pen on the same interface does not perform a page-turning operation; instead, it immediately and automatically activates the “write anytime” function.
For example, when reading a book, if I swipe with my finger I am turning the page; but once I write with the pen, I leave notes on the page—you can choose a fountain pen or a highlighter, and the handwriting will still be there the next time you turn back to that page. This already highly reproduces the ordinary reading experience. But a tablet can add even more operations, such as pressing and holding a word or a passage to immediately copy it, comment on it, look it up online, and so on.
In addition to reading, at any interface you can activate the electromagnetic pen at any time; the usual effect is to take a screenshot of the current page and then scribble on it. And a few applications specially designed for the pen have even more powerful functions, such as the reader just mentioned, office software for handling doc files, doodling on photos, and a specially designed “notebook.” This notebook can accept input via the soft keyboard, and you can also jot down notes with the pen at any time. While taking notes with the pen, you can turn on recording; after the recording is finished, if you click on a certain segment of the notes, it can automatically locate the corresponding time segment in the recording and play it back.
Unfortunately, there are not many software programs specially adapted for the electromagnetic pen, and they are still rather imperfect. For example, the reader can only read books in epub format (incidentally, there is an Android app called Mantano Reader that is very good; it can read epub, pdf, and many other formats, and at any time you can press and hold text to highlight, annotate, copy, look up words in the dictionary, and so on). But in any case, this basic idea is very on point—we use our fingers to operate and control, and use the pen to create and record. The Flyer’s pen exists purely for creation and recording; it no longer oversteps itself into an operating tool (though you can still set it back). In this sense, one could even say that only with the Flyer do our electronic devices truly possess a “stylus.”
Of course, HTC’s Flyer is after all a niche model, and may not necessarily represent the development trend of phones and tablets. Perhaps under the mainstream trend, the “pen” is ultimately destined to be eliminated. But in any case, the Flyer has lit up a glimmer of hope for the pen’s rebirth in the electronic age.
Let me say a bit more about the epub and pdf formats. Both are reading formats that strive for a kind of “compatibility.” But their characteristics are exactly opposite. PDF’s “compatibility” means that on any device, the layout effect is exactly the same; epub’s “compatibility” means that on any device it can display itself in the most suitable way, automatically reflowing in a manner adapted to the device. The spirit of PDF lies in loyalty to paper, whereas epub directly serves the text. PDF symbolizes the power of print; an “e-book” in the PDF sense is nothing more than a “digital version of a printed book,” with the “digital” merely serving the “printed,” a tool for more conveniently disseminating printed matter. But an e-book in the epub sense is truly a book of electronics. It no longer submits to the authority of “paper,” and truly begins to become a new kind of “book.” Of course, one advantage of print is the standardization of citation, embodied in the requirement that academic references must indicate page numbers. But if we ultimately skip the printed version and no longer take the printed form of the book as authoritative, then our citation method of course must also change. In fact, even if an e-book loses page numbers, it may still allow indexing and localization in a more precise way. If the point of citation is to facilitate readers’ retrieval and lookup, then if precise location can be achieved without page numbers, why would page numbers still be needed?
Once a book loses its emblematic product of the print age—page numbers—the significance for human thought and culture will be equally far-reaching, with a meaning as momentous as the birth of page numbers themselves, yet just as easily overlooked.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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