When HP purchased Palm last year, it made no secret of the fact that it was doing so to get a hold of Palm’s webOS operating system in order to better compete with Apple in the tablet and smartphone space.
Now, at an official event today, HP is starting to finally reveal what they’ve accomplished with webOS in the last year. First up? The HP Veer, a tiny pebble of a phone meant to bridge the gap between feature phones and smartphones.
Boasting a 2.6-inch glass touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, the HP Veer runs on an 800MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 processor and comes with 8GB of storage. Connectivity includes WiFi and GPS, as well as 14Mbps HSPA+. There’s also a rear facing 5 megapixel camera, but no LED flash.
Like the Verizon iPhone, the Veer’s 3G connection can be used as a personal hotspot for connected devices thanks to HP’s Mobile Hotspot feature. The Veer also boasts the latest HP Touchstone technology, which is effectively HP’s own version of “Bump,” allowing webOS devices to transfer information simply by tapping them together.
In all honesty, this looks like a good phone. It’s not trying to beat the iPhone at its own game, but instead, appeal to an entirely different type of customer… the kind of person who’d buy a tiny iPhone mini over an iPhone 4.
The HP Veer will ship early this spring, with pricing and carriers still to be announced.
