AT&T announced May 4 that it will be selling HP’s Veer WebOS smartphone in its physical brick and mortar and online retail sites for $99.99 (2 year contract). The HP Veer is going to be an AT&T exclusive, and is singularly unique due to its physical size. It is very small, and weighs next to nothing at 3.63 ounces. If you can imagine a phone the size of your credit card, and a little thinner than a deck of cards, you have the HP Veer. Comparisons to the phones shown in the movie Zoolander have comically been raised, but they aren’t far off.
When the idea of the Veer being a child’s phone was voiced, due to its diminutive size and the tiny slide-out keyboard, AT&T and HP both clamored to put that notion to rest. Certainly, smaller hands will be better suited for such a tiny phone, but they both rushed to remind those at the announcement that the feature set is definitely not just child’s play.
HP says that “under the hood” is where all the big things happen on the Veer, and AT&T stated that they were trying to make an “alternative” to the bigger smartphones seen everywhere. HP Palm blogger Jon Zilber blogged Wednesday that no one should let the Veer fool them, it is just that powerful. According to Zilber, webOS is flexible enough to bring the big-screen smartphone experience to the smaller screen effectively, especially with the help of the webOS apps available.
The HP Veer will allow downloads directly from the HP WebOS App Catalog, and hotspot capabilities are available as well, with a DataPro 4GB subscription. AT&T Navigator is also on board, acting as a GPS device, but also requires an enabling subscription.
At 2.6 inches the screen is very small, but it is powered by an 800-Mhz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 processor, has full Flash support, 8 GB of storage and a 5 mp camera. Since this is the first HP webOS product to hit the streets, there may be some bugs admits HP, but they promise to make the Veer smartphone experience dynamite, just in a small package.
