At the company’s highly anticipated media event today, HP announced a pair of new yet familiar smartphones: the Veer and Pre 3. The Veer is a webOS-based smartphone bucking the current industry trend of “bigger is better.” The device has the Pre, pebble-like shape — complete with slide-up keyboard — and a 2.6-inch, 320 x 400 pixel, capacitive touchscreen display. The Veer is powered by a Snapdragon 7230 processor running at 800MHz, has an HSPA+ radio, and sports Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 +ERD, 8GB of internal storage, rear-facing camera (no flash) and mobile hotspot capabilities. The device will be available “this spring.”
Next, the company rolled out the Pre 3. The newest Pre maintains its familiar form and packs a 3.6-inch capacitive touchscreen display with 480 x 800 pixel resolution and gesture area, the “largest QWERTY keyboard”, 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 +ERD, 8GB or 16GB of on-board storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and HD video recording capabilities, Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities, and a front-facing VGA camera for video-calling. The device will be available in HSPA+ and CDMA Rev. A flavors sometime “this summer.”
Both the Veer and the Pre 3 are listed as having “the same amount of RAM as the Pre 2” — 512MB.
Not that radically different from the current webOS smartphones out there, but some nice spec upgrades. The timeline is a little too lengthy (summer for a revamped Pre?) for our tastes… what do you think?
