MWC 2011 Live: HTC Flyer Second Hands-on; iPad & Galaxy Tab Also Featured

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Yesterday I went to the HTC booth even before the official announcement was over. There were no new devices and the staff didn’t really know what to tell us about the stuff we knew was coming but did advise me to come back later.

When I returned I found a plethora of Android smartphones and after some asking around I found the 7-inch Flyer tablet too. But it was carefully locked inside a cabinet and at the time I spent there looking at all the new HTC Android handsets there, no demos of the Flyer were made.

Upon returning today at the MWC campus I headed to the HTC booth immediately and asked around about an actual demo of the Flyer and, much to my surprise, I was told that such demos would be available. Therefore I have made sure I snapped plenty of almost hands-on images with the device. Yes I touched it too, but the one I handled wasn’t running as it was out of power. Speaking about battery life, well, the HTC rep told us the Flyer can run two back to back movies, so depending on how long these movies are, we’re looking at an up to 4 hours battery life while playing movies.

The HTC staff wasn’t really read to let the curious crowd play with the Flyer as the tablet is not quite ready yet for the masses. I’ll note that HTC had a lot of time to build a tablet for MWC. In fact since the arrival of the iPad there was plenty of time to reinvent the tablet the HTC-way but unfortunately the Flyer is not a complete product yet.

Sure, it looks like HTC is bringing a touch of its own to the tablet universe and the Flyer might be a lot more interesting than I determined yesterday. The tablet did stumble a few times, but while it was running the HTC rep was able to move freely from menu to menu and show us various features of the phone. Of course, this time around the tablet was not just lying hidden behind a glass and we were shown some of its capabilities. In fact the Flyer seems, at second hands-on, a lot more interesting than the Galaxy Tab and it could be a very tough BlackBerry PlayBook competitor.

We’ll just have to wait for it to come out before we can make a better comparison between the Flyer and all the other tablets out there. I will say this though, the Flyer comes Honeycomb-free at first, so it would be kind of hard to compete against the Xoom, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the Optimus Pad. For now we’ll stick to sizing it up against the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, so look for those comparisons in the gallery below!