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ORLANDO, Fla.–The HTC Flyer was one of the more interesting gadgets we saw last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Even in a show full of tablets, the Flyer stood apart due to its sleek aluminum body, and nifty 7-inch display, and innovative Scribe technology.
We left Spain wondering when it would arrive in the United States, and this week we’re glad to see that CTIA 2011 provided an answer. Not only did Sprint rebrand the Flyer as the WiMax-equipped Evo View, but also Best Buy announced that it would start selling a Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet later this spring.
Best Buy’s Flyer (the store will use HTC’s name) will offer all the features we saw on the debut device. Goodies include Bluetooth, dual microphones for noise reduction (when using the audio recorder), a 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of ROM, HTC’s Sense UI, Adobe Flash 10.1 support, a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus, a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera, and a microSD card slot. And given that it’s Wi-Fi only, you won’t need to get a carrier’s data plan to use it.
At the moment the Flyer will run the Gingerbread OS. That doesn’t make us happy, but then again we’ve come to realize from using the Motorola Xoom that Honeycomb is still in its shakedown period. Best Buy didn’t say so specifically, but this Flyer should get an OS upgrade at some point in the future.
Pricing wasn’t announced at the time of this writing, but given that it costs 499 euros across the Atlantic, we expect a U.S. sticker of about $674.
Update: CNET’s full review of the HTC Flyer is now available.
HTC Flyer hands-on (photos)
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