Having seen the new tablets flying about the place, HTC decided to take a flyer on a new tablet – and called it fittingly the HTC Flyer.

We should point out these aren't our hands in the pictures; instead an HTC stand bunny did all the demonstrating, but we got more than enough of an impression of the device to bring you this early preview.

HTC has decided to release the tablet running on Android Gingerbread, which will upset some purists that only believe these tablets should run on Honeycomb.

However, the HTC Sense overlay deals with that, offering a new range of widgets and content to mask the fact it's running older versions of the OS (although a Honeycomb update is imminent).

The new tablet has a 7-inch LCD screen, and comes with an aluminium unibody shell that feels very nice in the hand.

The HTC Flyer is really light at just 415g, and with a thickness of just 13.7mm, it really feels at home in the palm. Whether or not you believe the 7-inch screen size is too small or not, the tablet does fit nicely in a jacket pocket or bag.

The outside of the tablet comes with the mandatory thick bezel it seems every single device has to come with these days, but this doesn't detract from the overall appearance.

There are the standard HTC buttons at the bottom to control the Menu, Back, Search and Home functions, and these glow pleasantly when in use.

The HTC Flyer has very few buttons on the outside of the device save for a volume rocker on the right-hand side, and these are relatively easy to hit without too much jiggling.

The HTC Flyer's interface is pretty much just the standard HTC Sense offering, but made a lot bigger. HTC is claiming that it has rebuilt the OS from the ground up, but this is more to do with the applications working in landscape than anything else.

The notifications bar at the top of the device is overhauled as well to include both notifications and quick access to settings – something it shares with the new HTC Desire S.

The tablet comes with new 3D widgets that pop up as you scroll around the Home screen, and as you can see, the widgets have been made larger and easier to hit than before thanks to the increased screen size and resolution (1024 x 600).

We had a good look at the stylus that comes with the HTC Flyer as well, and we're not as impressed as we'd hoped we would be. However, this is an early build still so we'll reserve judgement until then.

However, the pressure sensitivity doesn't really seem to work that well when trying to annotate text – although the range of brushes and options were accurate and useful.

Every time an application can make use of the new stylus, a small icon pops up in the bottom right hand side of the screen to edit the brush types and use case – if the stylus proves to be useful, this will be a nifty feature.

The only other things of note with the HTC Flyer are HTC Time Mark, which can note as and when you're using the stylus in tandem with the audio recording, and the video player.

When using the Time Mark software, every time you take a note or a picture it appears in the green timeline at the top of the device, and allows you to see what's been said or created at a specific point.

We weren't blown away by the video quality on the device we were having the demonstration with, but with the settings unable to be altered at this early stage we couldn't get the brightness to an acceptable level anyway – whether this will be a decent PMP substitute remains to be seen.

Overall, we're mostly impressed with the HTC Flyer – the new version of HTC Sense with dual-pane windows for things like video, contacts and mail looked like it worked well when it all flashed past our eyes.

However, we'll be interested to find out whether consumers will accept a 7-inch single-core device running an older version of Android in the face of dual-core larger options. HTC seems to think so but a lot will depend on price, and that's worryingly rumoured to be a little high.