HTC Flyer announced today at the Mobile World Congress

[MWC] HTC has a plethora of devices (six to be exact) that they will be announcing at the Mobile World Congress today, and their most-anticipated device has got to be their Android tablet known as the HTC Flyer. After staying out of the tablet game last year, it looks like HTC is ready to dip its toes into this highly saturated market – whether or not it can make a difference, we’ll find out soon enough. The HTC Flyer packs a 1.5GHz processor, a 7″ display for viewing content and support for HSPA+ that ensures you stay connected at high speeds all the time.

The HTC Flyer is one of the few Android tablets that won’t be running on Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) but it will ship with Android 2.4 (Gingerbread) instead. Apparently it’s not the operating system that will make the tablet stand out, but the features that HTC will be implementing in the device instead. A brand new HTC Sense for tablets that gives users a 3D homescreen and widgets that place important content and information at the visual center of the experience. It will also fully support web browsing with Flash 10 and HTML 5, so you get the complete web experience on the tablet itself.

The tablet also packs some features that make it stand out from the crowd – HTC Scribe Technology that transforms the device into a note-taking machine. Users will be able to write, draw and even sign contracts on the screen itself – bringing the act of holding a pen back to today’s touchscreen-typing generation.

HTC’s new video download service, HTC Watch, will also premiere with the HTC Flyer to bring low-cost on-demand progressive downloading of hundreds of HD movies from major studios to the consumer. The HTC Flyer will also be the first tablet to launch with the OnLive cloud gaming service – look out for people playing games like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and NBA2K11 when this tablet launches. It looks like HTC got all its bases covered on the entertainment side of things.

HTC seems to have the blueprints for a great tablet, though the exclusion of Honeycomb seems to be a strange decision. Will HTC Sense for tablets be good enough to justify a Gingerbread tablet? We’ll just have to wait and see. Stay tuned for more details of HTC’s debut tablet.

Update: We now have a preview of the HTC Flyer with video footage of the tablet in action. Head here to check it out.

George Wong
Categories: Tablets
Tags: Android, android tablet, flyer, HTC, mobile world congress, mobile world congress 2011, MWC, MWC 2011, sense, Tablet