It seems like almost every phone and computer maker has a 10-inch tablet these days. HTC will be joining the ranks sooner or later with its Puccini tablet. We are treated with some leaked images of the rumored tablet from Pocketnow. The pictures are able to give us some information about the soon to be released device, but there is still a lot we don’t know about the tablet.
As we can tell from the images the tablet will be released on AT&T, which was assumed before, but now it looks to be official. You can tell because of all of the AT&T apps hanging out in the app tray. It looks as though there are at least four AT&T-specific apps, which is safe to assume can’t be removed. There looks to be a few other included apps as well, including a few HTC apps and a game or two.
We are also able to see that HTC has put its own custom skin on Android. For example, the typical Honeycomb buttons in the lower left of the screen are re-skinned on the Puccini, they are made to look more like the buttons you find on Android phones. You will also notice that there is a pen icon to the right of the standard buttons. This seems to confirm that the tablet will use a similar stylus interface as its smaller sibling.
Here you can see that HTC has also changed around the Honeycomb keyboard. This change looks familiar to the custom keyboard we recently saw on the Sony tablets. Instead of having the letters span the whole width of the screen, HTC has thrown in a number pad on the right side. It will be interesting to see just how usable a keyboard of this style will be.
It is rumored that the Puccini will be one of the first LTE devices on AT&T, which means we can most likely expect a release some time after October. If it is a purely LTE device, it will most likely only have service in a very select few cities for quite some time.
