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.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
17 responses to “HP’s Pre3 Is No Threat To The iPhone”
the writer has forgotten to compare the software of the phones…
which I find much better on any pre than on any Iphone.
Not that the Iphone is bad, but for my taste it’s too simple while WebOS is also keeps it simple but more fun!
I agree with GVeen. The WebOS makes the phone really. I had an iPhone 3G for years and always found the OS too limited. It’s basically just an app launcher and does nothing else.