Just a few days after Best Buy began offering the HTC Flyer 7 inch Android tablet for $299.99, the electronics retailer marked down the price to $99.99 last night. Unfortunately the tablet is already sold out online, but it may still be available in some stores.
Members of the SlickDeals Forum noticed the markdown last night, and as of this morning at least one person has confirmed that Best Buy is offering the HTC Flyer for the same low price in-stores… if you can find a store that still has the tablet in stock.
No other stores seem to be offering the Flyer for this low price. It’s not entirely clear whether Best Buy even meant to drop the price to $99.99, or if this was some sort of typo. Perhaps someone made a mistake when lowering the price from $499.99 to $299.99 — and set the latter price as the new base price and then applied a $200 discount on top of it.
Update: It looks like this was a mistake. While the website hasn’t yet been updated, Best Buy is apparently telling employees to remove any signage suggesting the tablet is priced at $99 — and apparently the company will not honor the price.
Still, the HTC Flyer is suddenly a hot commodity and the whole incident feels a lot like the HP TouchPad firesale. HP launched its 10 inch tablet in July for close to $500 but didn’t sell very many. 45 days later the company canceled the product dropped the price to $100 in order to liquidate the remaining inventory and the tablet sold out at HP.com, Best Buy, and other locations in minutes.
The tablet features a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon single core processor, 16GB of storage, a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen display and an active digitizer for use with an optional digital pen — which lets you write or draw on the screen.
I reviewed the Flyer in June, and while it ships with Android 2.3 Gingerbread instead of the newer Android 3.2 Honeycomb operating system designed for tablets, I actually really liked the little guy. It’s light weight and fast, and feels like a great tablet for anyone looking for something a little larger than a smartphone, but more portable than a 10 inch tablet.
HTC may also soon offer a software update with Honeycomb or Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
My biggest complaint at the time was that the $500 price tag seemed to be way too high. It looks like I may not have been the only one that thought so.
Someone should contact the FTC about this. This is bait and switch.
Fake offer/bait & pull bait– best buy just wanted you to come by and visit. Maybe buy a few overpriced HDMI cables.
The HTC Flyer appears to have the best battery life in the 7″ class. I have read a few reviews that say up to 10 hours. I will be curious to see how Amazon new tablet performs.
P.S. This from engadget:
“Really, really impressive. We unplugged the Flyer at 9AM one morning,
spent the full day throwing everything we could think of at it — push
updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and a news feed of Engadget and
BBC updates, plus extensive camera testing, web browsing, music
playback, and a solid hour of Angry Birds Rio gameplay — and
by 9PM in the evening we still had over 20 percent of juice left. For a
3G device whose cellular connection was regularly put to use, that was a
spectacular performance.”
You had me going for a minute as I bought one Saturday morning at a store for the $299 price. I will say I like it and handwriting function was what I was looking for.
price mistake not a real sale
Arggggghh misssed it again