Friday, April 22, 2011

Introducing the HP Veer



The Veer was demoed to be able to
run Angry Birds, but also intense
3D gaming.
Probably the most powerful smartphone for its size, the HP Veer was announced alongside the TouchPad and the Pre 3 at HP's February 9th "Think Big, Think Small, Think Beyond" event.  Apparently HP was thinking small, because the Veer is pretty much a smaller version of the Pre 2, with a potentially faster processor and GPU combination.

The Veer supports wireless
charging by setting it on a
Touchstone. 
Starting with the form factor:  The Veer is comparable to a the size of a credit card, and could fit inside a deck of cards case.  The device has a 2.6 inch, 320 by 400 pixel, glass touch screen that supports multitouch (If you can fit more than one finger on it, that is) and a slide-out keyboard, which is said to be engineered to be the best keyboard on any webOS device created to date.  The device has a 5 megapixel camera with extended-depth-of-field on the back, but lacks an LED flash - making it the only webOS phone to not have a flash for the camera.


The Veer won't have a headphone
 jack, but will have a connector to
add a  headphone jack.
The processor in the phone is packing a lot of horsepower, despite being 800MHz - a Snapdragon MSM7230, capable of being overclocked to nearly 2 GHz (Shown on the T-Mobile android G2), accompanied by an Adreno 205 GPU.

The Veer has a smaller battery than any webOS phone to date - a 910 mAh non-removable (Also a first for webOS phones) battery.  The battery life is said to be similar to that of previous Pre models, with up to 5.0 hours of talk time or 300 hours of standby time.  But despite not being able to remove the battery, the device comes with a touchstone-compatible back cover, allowing the device to charge inductively by just setting it on the touchstone.

The device lacks a micro-USB and headphone jack in order to keep a small form factor, so instead HP opted to include a magnetic strip on the device that connects to an adapter to allow either micro-usb access or a headphone jack.

The Veer and its magnetic adapter




The HP Veer will ship with webOS 2.2, but will be upgradeable to webOS 3.0.  With a software update, the Veer will be able to utilize Touch-to-Share with an HP Touchpad.

The device will have 512 MB of  RAM and  8 GB of storage.  The Veer will also have dual-microphones for noise cancellation, and  is expected to be available this May.


And to finish off, a video with the HP Veer hands-on:



HP's official video for the Veer:



20 comments:

  1. Wow, looks very interesting, I've always been very impressed with the Web OS platform and it's multitasking system. great blog post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. pretty impressive, i've been looking for a new phone recently

    ReplyDelete
  3. wow this is awesome, where is the pricing info !

    ReplyDelete
  4. No prices annouced yet (But I'm expecting that because it'll be a lower end webOS device it'd be at a feature-phone pricing - $50 or $100 on a two year contract in the US).

    In the United States it looks like it will be launched exclusively on AT&T's network, while in Europe it has been confirmed for O2 Germany, and it should also be coming to SFR in France.

    Personally I would recommend the HP Pre 3 (Writing an article on it tomorrow). I guess the features the Veer has over the Pre 3 is how small it is, the keyboard it has, that it will be out a month earlier, and that it will be priced cheaper.

    But if you're looking for an iPhone competitor rather than a tiny smartphone, I'd recommend the Pre 3.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm just wondering if there is still space for webOS (which is great, but I don't think it gets so much support from the developers) in the market.

    ReplyDelete
  6. neat,i watched the video and it looks pretty promising...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Great post,
    Ill give you a cheezburger friend.
    Hope everyone supports this blog as well.

    Jake

    ReplyDelete
  8. I really want one of these. Great post.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The phone looks cool. About the OS... is it the same as Palm Pixi Plus?

    Actually I'm fallen in love with Android, but since I consider my self quite like a geek, I would like to have the oportunity to try it out

    ReplyDelete
  10. @Keine
    The OS is an updated version of the Pixi Plus's OS (Instead of webOS 1, it runs webOS 2).

    The phone's pretty much a successor to the pixi TBH. But with a different form factor.

    ReplyDelete
  11. nice review, not a bad phone but i like my android better

    ReplyDelete
  12. Sweet! Any idea what its going to run?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Looks pretty cool. The dual mics for noise cancellation is BRILLIANT

    ReplyDelete
  14. Dude, such an in depth review, well done. It looks to be a decent bit of kit to be honest.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I should better start saving up... that looks really nice.

    ReplyDelete