HTC Flyer available for pre-order in UK with £600 price and May launch date
HTC's first Android tablet, the Flyer, will be on sale in the UK this May according to Carphone Warehouse, which is taking pre-orders for the device now.
The Flyer might be lacking Android 3.0 Honeycomb thrills but, as HTC's first tablet, it's still attracting its fair share of attention. Now you can pre-order one from the Carphone Warehouse, albeit with a meaty £600 price tag attached.
That price is for the SIM-free version of the device. Carphone Warehouse's listing made us fall off our chairs in surprise, with the company describing the Flyer as 'in stock'. But SlashGear says it was informed by Carphone Warehouse that the device won't actually ship until May.
Carphone Warehouse isn't the only company offering the HTC Flyer for pre-order. Clove lists the device for the same price, but claims that its first stock will arrive in mid-April. Amazon is going with a £600 price tag too, but claims a release date of 5 May. Take yer pick.
Announced at Mobile World Congress in February, the Flyer is a 7-inch tablet with an aluminium unibody casing, and a 1.4GHz single-core processor. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread rather than Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which will be used by most Android slates.
HTC has made much of the Flyer's stylus, which can be used to scribble notes on the capacitive touchscreen, although you can also do all the tapping and swiping that you would on other tablets. HTC's Sense user interface will be present, although we're still waiting to find out if the OnLive gaming service will feature on the Flyer at its UK launch, as it's expected to in the US.
The Flyer is just the start of HTC's tablet ambitions. In March, rumours emerged of a 10-inch model heading our way later this year. Later that month, speculation suggested that two new Flyers would be out in the summer, with larger screens and Android 3.0.
Could the older operating system leave the initial HTC Flyer gathering dust on the shelves while people wait for new models? Sometime in the next month, we'll find out.