14 DAY TRIAL // HTC officially announced yesterday during an event in London, that the HTC Flyer will be hitting European stores on the 9th of May. This is a more accurate release date opposite to the vague Q2 2011 term mentioned by the manufacturer at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, back in February.
Although the tablet is already available for pre-orders from various UK retailers, it is considered to be overpriced for what it has to offer.
Carphone Warehouse has the Flyer listed at £599.99, which is more expensive than Motorola's XOOM that can be purchased for around £580.
However, as HTC has yet to disclose the tablet's suggested retail price, there's a slim chance that Flyer's price will be lowered a bit prior to shipping once the manufacturer issues a statement.
For the moment, HTC Flyer seems to lose ground, even though it hasn't even been released on the market.
While all its competitors have announced very powerful tablets with dual-core processors and Honeycomb on board, HTC Flyer is the only device that has neither of them.
In this regard, HTC confirmed recently that the Flyer would receive the Android 3.0 Honeycomb software upgrade sometime this year, but hasn't unveiled specific details about the time of the deployment.
The HTC Flyer has a 7-inch touchscreen display that supports a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution and 16 million colors.
It is powered by a 1.5GHz application processor and packs 32GB of internal memory, 1GB of RAM as well as a microSD memory card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).
As for those living in the States, they will have to wait on Sprint's EVO View tablet, which is the same as the European Flyer, or Best Buy's WiFi-only version, which is presumably coming this spring.
It remains to be seen how the Flyer is received by consumers and how fast the device's price drops in case of negative feedback.