An image of what’s purportedly the HTC Puccini has been leaked to Pocket Now, along with some juicy details. They say the Puccini, obviously a codename since no company in their right mind would name a product after the Italian composer who wrote Madama Butterfly, will have a 10 inch screen, run Android Honeycomb, and most mysterious of all it’ll be able to use AT&T’s as yet to be launched LTE network. The device is supposed to come out in June and the price has yet to be determined, but what we’re interested in is the LTE aspect. If the Puccini really does hit the market in June, does that mean we’ll also see AT&T finally launch a real 4G network during the same month, or will we get some ridiculous “4G ready” excuse similar to how the Motorola Xoom was supposed to use Verizon’s 4G LTE network, but required that you send it in and wait a week while it’s torn apart and put back together?
Now we sure hope the Puccini isn’t just a 10 inch version of the Flyer, because making a tablet with a single core processor in this day and age would be like building a steam boat to haul cargo across the Atlantic ocean. The June launch timeframe suggests that it’s likely to pack NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processor inside, because just about every other tablet that will launch during this summer will use the same chip. The only thing differentiating these black slabs from each other is the price tag and build quality.
Google I/O is going to start in less than 12 hours and if there’s anything new and interesting happening around tablets, we’ll be there to cover the news. If you’ve been holding off on buying a tablet, what exactly are you waiting to see before you make the leap?