Underwhelmingly specced HTC Flyer priced at £599.99

HTC’s first foray into the murky world of underground tablet fighting doesn’t look that hot on the fight card.

Weighing in at a lightweight 420 grams, the new 7-inch tablet PC certainly has the edge when it comes to portability over rivals like the Motorola Xoom and iPad 2, but the internal specs are similarly lightweight.

Rather than a dual-core processor, HTC has plumped for a new 1.5GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon, and has installed the ‘not made for tablets’ Android Gingerbread (with HTC Sense UI) instead of the ‘made specifically for tablets’ Honeycomb.

It’s also, interestingly, a stylus-based system, which will either make it a breath of fresh air, or just a weird throwback to when portable PCs had the Palm logo slapped on the top of their displays.

In any case, this is information we already knew before today. What we didn’t know was where the new machine would fit in when it came to price.

Much like the Galaxy Tab before it, the Flyer may be smaller than the usual size but it’s certainly not cheaper, with Carphone Warehouse putting the pre-order price of an unlocked 3G model at £599.99.

This is compared to the 10-inch, dual-core Xoom and iPad 2 (3G model), which currently retail for around £480 and £499 respectively.