If you have been shopping for a 7 inch tablet this has been a great week for you. First Amazon announces its Fire tablet, and then BlackBerry announced a massive price reduction on its 7 inch Playbook. Starting October 1 you will also be able to buy a 7 inch HTC Flyer tablet from Best Buy for $299, a $200 dollar discount.
We were pretty impressed with the HTC Flyer when we got a chance to play with one in March. When it was released it offered two things that no other tablet could, HTC’s Sense UI and a stylus. HTC modified the Android experience to incorporate a stylus so that people could take hand written notes or doodle on the 7-inch screen.
It seems very clear that both BlackBerry and HTC are reducing prices due directly to Amazon’s entry into the tablet market. Even though a $299 tablet is more appealing than a $499 tablet, Amazon still has both the other companies beat at just $199. We are guessing that this is just the start of the price cuts for both of these products, and we might end up having an HP situation on our hands with a massive fire sale on at least one of them.
Something to keep in mind if you are lured into Best Buy this weekend to pick up a discounted Flyer is that the stylus is not included in the $299 price tag. Of course you have to use HTC’s stylus, and that will set you back $79.99. Just to put that in perspective, the Amazon Kindle Fire is just over twice the price of the Flyer’s stylus.
