HP Veer

Available now
9th February 2011

The HP Veer is the more compact companion to the new HP Pre 3, a credit card sized smartphone with a highly usable feature set, the Veer is probably what the Palm Pixi should have been when it was launched.

There isn't much big-name competition in this market sector except for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini and Mini Pro Android phones which offer a broadly similar product. The Veer has a small 2.6" 320 x 400 pixel touchscreen, 3.5G support with WiFi, a 5 megapixel camera and GPS in a form factor measuring just 84 x 55 x 15mm and coming in at 103 grams.

Compared to the compact Sony Ericsson, the Veer has a higher resolution display and faster processor, and the webOS 2.1 operating system is arguably a more polished offering than Android. Inside the HP Veer is an 800 MHz Qualcomm processor, faster than the X10 Mini's 600 MHz. Overall, the Veer might not have the specifications of a top-of-the-range smartphone, but it certainly won't embarrass itself.

Customers will probably be drawn to the HP Veer because of the small size rather than the well-regarded operating system. webOS 2.1 does offer a very different experience to Android or the iPhone's iOS platform, but it is just as capable in general terms. webOS doesn't have as many applications as its rivals, but the number of apps is increasing all the time and HP's new webOS-based devices may encourage more developers to this particular operating system.

HP say that the Veer should be available this spring, but they did not give any guidance on price. Given that the X10 Mini Pro retails for a shade over €200 SIM-free, we would expect the Veer to come in slightly above that.. our best guess is that the street price will be about €250 to €275 at launch.

We can't tell if the HP Veer will be a hit or not, but if HP can actually get this elegant little smartphone into retailers then it might be in with a good chance.

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