HP’s teeny tiny webOS powered Veer smartphone is going to ship pretty soon if the rumors we heard a few weeks back hold true. According to the gossip that’s been floating around on the internet the Veer will launch with AT&T on May 2nd. When new devices are announced an explosion of marketing campaigns typically come out of the woodwork as well, assaulting every one of our senses in the form of billboards, commercials, ads on websites, and in newspapers/magazines. One intrepid young man who was stuck in Los Angeles traffic, otherwise known as the 6th layer of hell, spotted a truck carrying precious cargo in the shape of two Mini Coopers plastered with ads for the “Veer 4G”. The marketing message reads: “Small is the new big”; cue the “That’s what she said!” joke. The more important question, does the Veer deserve to be called a 4G device? According to HP’s website the Veer does 7.2 Mbps on the downlink and 5.76 Mbps on the uplink, and in Europe this is known as 3.5G. T-Mobile USA didn’t even start calling their network 4G until they launched some towers that delivered 21 Mbps speeds, so what gives? Is AT&T lying to consumers yet again? Looks like it.
Other specifications for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the Veer: it has a 2.6 inch 320 x 400 pixels resolution screen, slide out QWERTY keyboard, 5 megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 8 GB of storage built in, and a 910 mAh non-removable battery that frankly scares us a little in terms of what sort of performance it can deliver.
Update: We scrolled down HP’s website a little bit and it also says that the Veer has the Qualcomm MSM7230 inside, the same chip inside the T-Mobile G2. That’s capable of 14.4 Mbps download speeds. This says 2 things: A) That 7.2 Mbps downlink speed on HP’s page is a typo and B) 14.4 Mbps is apparently the baseline of what AT&T considers to be 4G.