The HTC Flyer is finally available and the 7-inch Android tablet packs some spiffy features which may make it stand out from the packed field. We’ll have a full review up in a few days but feel free to take a gander at some of these pictures.
If you don’t remember, the HTC Flyer sports a 7-inch display, 1.5 GHz Snapdragon processor, 5-megapixel rear camera, front-facing camera, 32 GB of storage and a brushed aluminum enclosure. This adds a little bit of weight to the device but it’s definitely worth it – the Flyer is bigger than a device like the Samsung Galaxy Tab but it feels like a more premium device.
Unlike the Xoom or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (you can win one at our party, BTW), the HTC Flyer uses Android Gingerbread with the customized Sense UI. This is the latest version of Sense and many of these elements will land on the Sensation. This include cool little features like being able to unlock the device and dive directly into a specific app, 3D animations and just a pretty overall experience. While Honeycomb would be nice to have for some of its advanced capabilities, the Sense UI runs like a dream on this Snapdragon and it makes this the prettiest Android tablet out there.
You are definitely giving up screen real estate for this form factor, as you can see in the images below that it’s about roughly half the overall screen viewing space as the Galaxy Tab 10.1. That portability has its benefits though and I’ll be giving this a good working over at a conference this week. I’ll be honest with the pros and cons.
The device also is compatible with a capacitive stylus dubbed the “Scribe.” I haven’t dived into this extensively yet but the goal is to allow you to annotate websites, jot down notes, draw and more. I’m not sure if it’s worth $80 but I’ve been wrong before.
The WiFi-only version of the HTC Flyer is available at Best Buy today for about $500. A connected version will land later as the EVO View 4G.
If you have any burning questions about this, let me know in the comments.
