On its HP/Palm "Think Beyond" webOS event at San Francisco, HP announced its newest Veer and Palm 3 smartphones that will start the new WebOS/Palm-less era.
Those who were eagerly awaiting for a small smartphone, rather than a 4.3-inch and 3.5-inch (yes, we are talking about iPhone 4) screen beasts that are selling today, will be pretty happy as HP's Veer can easily take the smallest smartphone crown with its 2.6-inch 320x400 screen. Although details regarding the price, choice of carriers, etc. haven't been announced, there is handful of specs for us to write about.
The HP Veer will have Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7230 processor clocked at 800MHz, a 5 megapixel EDoF camera, HSPA+ support, 8GB of storage and now pretty much standard, accelerometer, proximity and light sensors. Of course, HP squeezed in recently much talked about Touchstone support, mobile hotspot support and a slide out QWERTY keyboard, although due to the sheer size we must note that we honestly doubt that it will be any good.
As for the third take on the Pre, we must say that it looks a bit more serious. Packing the Qualcommm MSM8X55 Snapdragon CPU at 1.4GHz, 512MB of DRAM, a 3.58-inch multitouch screen with 24-bit color and 480x800 resolution, the Pre 3 also comes with HP's WebOS 2.2, a similar QWERTY keyboard with backlight paired up with "gesture area", 8 or 16GB of internal storage, full access to the web including support for Flash Player 10.1, 802.11bng WiFi, GPS/A-GPS, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 5 megapixel cammera with AF and flash, as well as a front video call camera, and a 1230 mAh battery. Of course, this one will also have a lot to do with HP's Touchstone, but we'll get to that later.
The Veer is scheduled to show up during this spring, and as noted, HP kept its mouth shut about carriers and pricing. The Pre 3 is, on the other hand, scheduled for this summer, for both 8 and 16GB versions. As you would have guessed, there is no word on Pre 3 price as well.
On a similar note, HP announced that its Pre 2 will start shipping tomorrow.
HP Veer
HP Pre 3