HTC plans trio of Android tablets, first coming in March

The Taiwanese consumer tech firm HTC is reportedly planning to introduce a trio of Android operated tablet PCs over the next few months, with the first expected to hit American stores before the end of March.

Sources from within the company’s supply chain have told Digitimes that a device called The Flyer will be first off the conveyor belt of HTC branded tablets and that it will be running on Android 2.3.

A release date of March would put it ahead of other relatively imminent tablet releases like the Xoom from Motorola and the BlackBerry Playbook from Research In Motion. However, such an early entry into the market will likely leave The Flyer having to start life with an operating system yet to be optimised for tablet functionality.

A 3.0 Honeycomb version of Google’s hugely popular OS is expected at some point in the first half of this year but could arrive too late for the first of HTC’s slate PC devices, at least if the latest reports on the subject are accurate.

Launching a tablet with an operating system that was essentially designed for mobile phones could add weight to the arguments made recently by Steve Jobs stand-in and Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook, who described potential iPad rivals as “vapour” and little more than “scaled-up smartphones”.

HTC’s smartphones have established themselves among the most popular in the UK and various other countries around the world in recent months, with its Desire range helping to popularise the increasingly prevalent Android OS from Google.