The HTC Flyer comes just after a slew of recent Android tablets including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola XOOM, and the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. But what makes this 7-inch tablet stand out is its compatibility with a digital stylus for convenient note-taking. Chris Davies from our sister site SlashGear has gotten his hands on it and brings us now the unboxing and his first impressions.

Although these days it seems the stylus, Davies finds that it does help set the HTC Flyer apart from the slew of near-identical Honeycomb tablets. The stylus shows promise and the digital ink flows smoothly despite the tablet’s 1.5GHz single-core Snapdragon processor. The tablet is also full of neat features such as Evernote integration with its handwriting recognition, a twin set of fascia buttons that rotate automatically for portrait or landscape orientation, and a sturdy paperback-sized chassis.

However, he notes that the HTC Flyer unfortunately still runs Android Gingerbread instead of Honeycomb, which could prove to be a problem for the device should updates to Honeycomb not pan out, although they are in the works. The absence of a holder for the digital stylus as well as broader app support for using the stylus are other negative elements. He will be doing a full review soon at SlashGear, so stay tuned. You can read his full first impressions here.