Review HP Veer 4G

Honey, who shrunk the Palm Pre? That was our first thought when we saw the absolutely tiny Veer running webOS 2.1.2 with the Pre's familiar design and slide-down QWERTY keyboard. We're not really sure why Palm (now a part of HP), thought the world needed a real life Zoolander phone. Sure, it's a conversation piece, but its small size makes it somewhat difficult to use. And that's a shame because there are some darned good smartphone specs under the hood, including an 800MHz CPU, 8 gigs of internal storage and capacitive multi-touch display.

In the US, the Veer (or Veer 4G as AT&T calls it), is available from AT&T. It has 3G and 4G HSPA 14.4Mbps on AT&T's bands as well as 2100MHz for Europe. The phone is available in black and white, and it ships with an easy to lose dongle adapter that's required to use a 3.5mm headset. It has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, WiFi 802.11b/g/n and a GPS.

The HP Veer 4G with headphone adapter attached.

The magnetic charging connector and headphone adapter.
The Veer is compatible with the Touchstone charging system (just lay the phone on the optional Touchstone to charge it), and it will be able to communicate wirelessly with the HP TouchPad tablet that will come out on July 1, 2011. The phone has a 910 mAh Lithium battery that's sealed inside.

We love webOS-- it's extremely intuitive, fun and has great eye candy. You get the full power of webOS with the Veer, but the screen size is the limiting factor. It's difficult to read web pages in the otherwise capable webkit web browser since text is tiny and the 320 x 400 resolution is low by today's smartphone standards. Normally easy to control on-screen elements are small on the Veer 4G. That said, HP and AT&T hope that feature phone users who loathe large phones and complex mobile operating systems will trade up for the power and features of the Veer 4G. Certainly the phone's browser, email client and app store offer a great deal more utility than a feature phone.


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