MWC: HTC Flyer first impressions

MOBILE PHONE MAKER HTC has announced its Flyer tablet at Mobile World Congress.

No tablet is released these days without someone saying that it is entering a market dominated by the Apple Ipad and to a lesser extent the Samsung Galaxy Tab and others, so how well it sells will depend on how much favour it finds amongst users.

On first glance there is a rather obvious element to its makeup that at best puts it on a par with the Galaxy Tab, but at worst, might put it squarely behind the rest of the upcoming competition.

The HTC Flyer, you see, runs the Android operating system, but will launch with version 2.3 or 2.4. This means that the tablet is running the smartphone friendly OS, but not the tablet specific Android 3.0, which might see users leave it sitting on the shelf until it is updated.

The Flyer is light, ultra-light if you listen to HTC, and weighs about the same as a paperback book. It's also pretty portable and the firm said that it would slot into a jacket pocket, however it did not provide a jacket pocket to illustrate this. Its lightness might be the result, or to blame for, the tablet's 7-inch screen. This size screen is also found on the original Galaxy Tab, and is rapidly becoming considered somewhat lacking.

The screen has 1,024x600 resolution, which is the same as RIM's Blackberrry Playbook, but is slightly less than the 1,024x768 display size of HP's Touchpad and the Apple Ipad. At the 7-inch mark it compares for size at least against the Galaxy Tab, but doesn't measure up against the 9.7-inch Apple Ipad.

It's worth noting that at 415g, the Flyer is sightly heavier that the Galaxy Tab, which weighs 380g, but practically floats when put aside the 740g HP Touchpad and the 680g Ipad.

Battery-wise the Flyer offers standby time of 820 to 1,470 hours and around four hours of video playback. Apple meanwhile boasts that its Ipad can withstand some ten hours of boobtubery and Samsung seven.

The Flyer offers a 1.5Ghz processor, the Touchpad a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core APQ8060 1.2GHz processor, the Galaxy Tab a Cortex A8 1.0GHz application processor, and the Apple Ipad a 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed system on a chip. µ