Rounding out a triumvirate of new webOS devices, HP just took the wraps off of the third-generation Pre, or Pre3, their new flagship webOS smartphone. Unfortunately, while the HP Veer was a cute pebble of a phone filling a unique niche, and the HP TouchPad is an able iPad competitor that might even hold its own against the iPad 2, the Pre3 just seems generic.
Running on Qualcomm’s 1.4Ghz MSM8x55 chipset and boasting up to 16GB of storage, the Pre3 has a 3.58-inch WVGA touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The Pre3 also gets two cameras, including a 5 megapixel affair on the back capable of shooting high-definition video and a front-facing camera for video calls.
Like all of HP’s other webOS products today, the Pre3 comes with webOS 3.0 and Flash Player 10.1 support. It also leverages HP’s new Touchstone technology to share information between webOS devices just by bumping them together, as well as charge wirelessly.
No one would call this a bad phone, but it’s certainly not a show stopper, and in every way except clockspeed, it’s a noticeably inferior phone to the iPhone 4… bad news for HP, considering the fact that by the time the Pre3 goes on sale in summer of 2011, it will be going head-to-head with the iPhone 5.
