Hey guys so today I’m here with my review of the HP Veer
4G for AT&T. I’ve been using this phone for the past few
days now so let me give you my full review. The first thing
that will jump out at you is the size of the phone. With a
2.6 inch display and a slide out physical keyboard the Veer
is absolutely tiny even compared to phones like the iPhone.
I’ll get into how this effects usability a bit later on but
suffice it to say that the 2.6 inch screen is nice and bright
and has a very reasonable resolution of 320x400 pixels. Phone
calls on the Veer are surprisingly good thanks to it’s dual
microphones. The speaker is also surprisingly decent with
good volume without any distortion when laid down on a flat
surface. The 4G part of the phone comes courtesy of the AT&T
HSPA+ network. Just like the Inspire 4G I recently reviewed
the Veer gets decent, if not amazing speeds. I typically found
somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 to 2 Mbps down and usually a
bit less than 1Mbps up assuming you have a good connection.
Certainly not bad but this is nowhere near the speeds you’ll
find on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. I’ll say it right now: I love
webOS. The multitasking is second to none and the gesture area
on the Veer allows you to control the phone effortlessly.
Currently on it’s 2.1.2 release as of this review webOS screams
on the Veer. Don’t let the small size fool you: this is a very
fast little phone. With an 800Mhz Snapdragon processor and
512MB of RAM it chews up and spits out multitasking as many
apps as you like. When you get into the apps however the Veer
becomes a bit of a mixed bag. It comes preinstalled with quite
a few apps such as a mail client, contacts app, a YouTube player,
Google Maps and Amazon MP3. Most all of these are just fine
however where the real issues lie is in the App Catalog. The interface
is decent but there are some fairly major holes in the selection
including an official Twitter app, Netflix, Skype and many many
other major apps that are unavailable. To make matters worse, not all
apps are available for the Veer if they were made for the larger
display on the Pre. Things get much better in the browser. While
you are of course constrained by the small display you’ll find
that the browser is quite fast and has some of the smoothest
zooming and scrolling I’ve ever seen. You’ll also find support
for Adobe Flash 10.1 for viewing Flash content which runs decently
like it does on most mobile devices but is less than perfect.
The camera is a sore spot. While it has a 5 megapixel sensor it
lacks both autofocus and a flash resulting in mediocre images in
most situations. On top of that I ran into a bug that crashed the
camera app and restarted the phone after taking a few pictures.
The story doesn’t get much better as the VGA video is fairly awful
as well. The size of the phone limits how big the keyboard can be
but overall I was impressed. The sliding mechanism seems to be
very robust and the keys had a nice tactile feel that had me up
to a decent typing speed in just a few days of using the Veer.
It also lights up subtly making it great for typing even when you
can’t easily make out the tiny keys. The Veer has a proprietary
magnetic charging and syncing port that’s very similar to the
MagSafe adapter on Apple laptops. It works well, connecting
strongly. What isn’t so great is the included 3.5mm headphone
adapter that snaps onto the phone. While this too snaps on easily
it’s tiny and almost certain to get lost in the first few days of
owning the phone. It’s a bit of a shame really as the sound chip
in the Veer actually sounds quite good once you hook headphones up.
Battery life on the Veer is decent. In my testing I found that I was
able to get through a day of moderate usage before the phone died.
Your mileage will certainly vary but you will almost certainly need to
plug the Veer in every night. The Veer is a bit of a hard phone to
sum up. On one hand you have a poor camera, a lackluster app store
and no way to expand the roughly 6GB of usable onboard storage.
But on the other hand you have a stellar OS, an absolutely
speedy experience and excellent build quality. What it boils down
to is are you interested in a small phone? If so the Veer is a great
choice and will serve you well. If size isn’t as big of a deal to you
though I would have to recommend taking a look the Pre 3 which should
be available in the coming months and has all of the same features
of the Veer but in a larger package. If you enjoyed this review be
sure to subscribe to the channel and if you are interested in
purchasing or learning more about the Veer hit up the link in the
description for up to date pricing information.