The forgotten tablet: HTC Flyer from 2011

March 27, 2022 Luisa Rey

HTC had better times a few years ago than it does now. It is now almost silent around the Taiwanese manufacturer. Eleven years ago, the company’s first tablet appeared; the HTC Flyer. Do you remember that one? We discuss him this week in our ‘Forgotten’ section.

HTC Flyer

In this edition of ‘The forgotten..’ we take you to a tablet that was released in 2011; the HTC Flyer. The tablet from the Taiwanese manufacturer was presented during the Mobile World Congress of that year. Of course, this device, like the various smartphones, was also equipped with its own Sense UI. Unlike other tablets at the time, this Flyer came with a stylus, which you could use to take notes, for example, or to start drawing. Selecting and highlighting text was also child’s play with the integrated stylus and it could be used for photo editing. There was also the option to make audio notes, which were linked to the notes.

The HTC Flyer had a screen size of 7.0 inches; an LCD screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The screen was a bit on the small side with this size, although we saw several tablets with this screen size around that time. Consider, for example, the BlackBerry PlayBook. HTC manufactured the device from aluminum. The tablet was powered by a 1.5GHz single-core processor from Qualcomm, so not yet a dual-core processor that we often encountered in those days. There was 1GB of RAM available, along with 16GB or 32GB of storage. In addition, the Flyer was provided with support for Flash in the browser.

With the HTC Flyer you had a stylish and typically recognizable HTC tablet at home. Although Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which was specially optimized for tablets, was out for a while, HTC delivered the Flyer with Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Later updates appeared, up to and including Android 3.2 Honeycomb. Nice detail; it was quite unique that the navigation keys then automatically rotated with the side of the screen. There was WiFi, and in the Netherlands you could also choose to purchase the 3G version of the Flyer. The tablet had GPS on board, as well as Bluetooth and a Micro-SD memory card slot for a card up to 32GB.

HTC Flyer

Taking pictures with the HTC Flyer was possible with the 5 megapixel camera on the back of the device. On the front was a 1.3 megapixel front camera. The HTC Flyer offered a 4000 mAh battery and this could be charged via the micro-USB connection on the bottom of the Flyer. Applications and games could be downloaded via the Android Market, which is now better known as the Google Play Store.

The HTC Flyer 16GB came on the market in the Netherlands for an amount of 520 euros. For 100 euros more you had the version with 32GB storage space and 3G.