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HTC follows BlackBerry to $299 tablet bargain bin

HTC's Flyer tablet pricing gets slashed by $200 at Best Buy. It's the latest tablet pricing adjustment at the retailer as the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire weighs heavily on the Android tablet market.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
HTC Flyer 7-inch tablet.
HTC Flyer 7-inch tablet. HTC

The HTC Flyer is the latest tablet to see its price kicked down a couple hundred bucks, as the market adjusts to the impact of the $99 HP TouchPad fire sale and a just-announced $199 Amazon Kindle Fire.

HTC's 7-inch Flyer fell from its pricey $499.99 heights at Best Buy to $299.99 on Friday.

It comes with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, a 1,024-by-600-pixel 7-inch color touch screen, front and rear cameras, 16GB of storage, 1GB RAM, Wi-Fi, a microSDHC card slot, and a single-core Qualcomm processor.

If the truth be told, the HTC tablet was overpriced to begin with, as CNET Reviews made clear back in May. But the overpriced-tablet phenomenon is not limited to HTC. Best Buy took identical pricing action on the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook earlier in the week. And Motorola caved to price pressure in July.

Don't be surprised when more tablet prices get downsized. If Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire is as popular as expected when released November 15, more pricing adjustments from other Android tablet makers are likely.

And Apple's iPad? Well, maybe that's asking too much.