Laptop Thoughts: Engadget Reviews the HTC Flyer: 12 Hours of Battery Life? Yowzers!

"Over the past couple of years, HTC has rapidly built up an enviable reputation (and bank balance) in the smartphone space with a succession of feature-rich, smartly designed, and innovative handsets...Today, the company's Android assembly line is turning out yet another groundbreaking device, though this one's closer in size to the Athena than the Aria. Yes, we're talking about the 7-inch Flyer, the most unique of this year's Android tablet offerings, opting for a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a sturdy aluminum construction that doesn't even try to compete in the race for extreme thinness, and a Magic Pen to make you forget it's running Gingerbread and not Honeycomb (yet)."

I have a soft spot in my heart for HTC products - I've watched this scrappy company grow from being a fairy small ODM making Pocket PCs for the likes of HP to being a powerful phone brand making phones for practically every carrier in the world. It was with great interest that I read this review of the HTC Flyer, because I've been wondering how this latest foray into the bigger-than-a-phone world would go for them this time. This isn't their first time at the plate - remember the HTC Advantage? Or the HTC Shift? Both were products that had a gem of awesomeness at their core but were ultimately limited by the hardware at the time.

So did the Flyer do any better? Yes and no. I was relieved - and quite impressed - that the battery life of the Flyer was tested at being 12 hours. There were rumours for the past couple of months that they battery life on the Flyer was a meagre four hours...I read it time and time again in forum comments, Tweets, etc. Why HTC didn't step up and correct this fallacy is beyond me - I was initially quite interested in the Flyer because I'm a fan of the 7 inch tablet form factor, but when I read about the four hour battery life I immediately axed this from my list of potential non-iPad 2 options.

It looks like the HTC is a strong contender in a field of competition - can it stand out, and can HTC slim it down in the next generation?