14 DAY TRIAL // During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, mobile phone carrier HTC unveiled its first Android-based tablet PC, the HTC Flyer, which should land on shelves soon in both 3G-capable and Wi-Fi-only flavors.
When made available, the new device would run under the Android 2.3 Gingerbread flavor of the mobile operating system, which was not optimized for use on tablet PCs.
However, it appears that the company would aim at making an OS upgrade available for the device at some unspecified point in the future.
When asked whether the HTC Flyer is planned for an upgrade to the Honeycomb version of Android, HTC responded yes, but did not offer info on when the update might become available.
“We will be offering a Honeycomb upgrade when it’s made available. What feature are you most excited about?,” a tweet from the company reads.
The Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform has a lot of appealing features to offer, especially when coupled with HTC's Sense UI for tablets, but it was not optimized for the larger screens that these devices sport. The Honeycomb platform, on the other hand, was built specifically for them.
According to some of the previous rumors on HTC's Flyer, the leading handset vendor would also plan the release of Honeycomb-based versions of the device in the not-too-distant future.
Nothing was confirmed officially on this, but the rumor might pan out, especially since it referred to Flyer models with larger displays than the original, which sports a 7-inch touchscreen panel.
Other handset vendors around the world who came up with tablets that run under 2.x flavors of Android switched to Honeycomb on their newer, larger devices.
For the time being, however, the only thing that is known for sure is that HTC does not plan on leaving Flyer on Gingerbread, and those who would purchase it would be able to enjoy Honeycomb on it, hopefully sooner rather than later.