HP Veer and webOS demonstration
It's not all Android at Mobile World Congress, with HP's very impressive webOS also being demonstrated on new hardware.
It seems that Google’s ubiquitous Android is everywhere right now, with smartphones, tablets and media players being launched in abundance here at Mobile World Congress. There are alternatives in the titanic battle between Apple and Android, though, one of which is HP’s webOS.
Just before the show HP announced three new webOS devices. The TouchPad got most of the attention, as it’s the first webOS tablet, but we’ll be covering that later today. Here we’re going to concentrate on the tiny HP Veer smartphone, and its larger sibling the Pre3.
The video above provides a great overview of HP’s intelligent smartphone operating system. There are loads of neat tricks here, like tasks sitting in individual windows that can be discarded with the flick of a finger. In one clever function, JustType, you just start typing and it prioritises a range of different options depending on what you type – such as contacts you might be searching for, or a Facebook status update button, or just a dial option. Check out the video for more details.
The Veer itself is a lovely little piece of kit. Its curvaceous and well-built, and unbelievably small. It measures only 55x84x15mm and weighs only 103g.
It’s a real head-turner, which looks unlike nay other handset we’ve seen. Despite its size it still has plenty of processing power, with a 800MHz processor, plus a decent resolution of 320×400 on its 2.6in display. We didn’t get a chance to try out the tiny slide out keyboard unfortunately.
The Pre3 is very similar in appearance to its little sibling. It far quicker though, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8x55 1.4-GHz processor. Screen size is up to 3.6in with a 480×800 resolution display. It too has the slide-out QWERTY keyboard and will come with either 8 or 16GB of internal storage. It’s still not massive at 111x64x16mm and 156g.
We’re really looking forward to getting these handsets in for full testing, webOS may not enjoy the app support of Android or iPhone at present, but the operating system and hardware work beautifully together.