The Veer is a smartphone announced by HP on February 9, 2011. The device uses

HP webOS webOS, also known as LG webOS and previously known as Open webOS, HP webOS and Palm webOS, is a Linux kernel-based multitasking operating system for smart devices such as smart TVs that has also been used as a mobile operating system. Initially ...

, is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and has a 2.6-inch screen. The smartphone is notable for its

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...

-sized dimensions (and a depth that is comparable to the size of a

deck of cards A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a fi ...

). The device is seen as the successor in the Palm line-up to the Pixi and earlier

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models.

History

The HP Veer was announced on February 9, 2011, along with the

HP Pre 3 The HP Pre 3, styled as Pre3 , is a touchscreen slider smartphone manufactured by Hewlett-Packard. The device uses webOS, is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and has a 3.6-inch screen. It is conceptually the successor to the Palm Pre ...

and the HP TouchPad. The Veer was released in the US on May 15, 2011 on the

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

network, and was marketed as the ''HP Veer 4G''. The device was slated to support the Touch-to-Share proximity-based sharing feature through a later update, but no official update supporting Touch-to-Share has been released although several users have purchased devices on eBay with fully implemented Touch-to-Share and SMS sharing support. Following HP's announcement on August 18 that it would cease development of all WebOS hardware, the Veer was discontinued, and similar to the TouchPad, the price was lowered significantly in a firesale.

Hardware

Processors

The HP Veer is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 which is a system-on-a-chip made by

Qualcomm Qualcomm () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software, and services related to wireless technology. It owns patents critical to the 5G, 4 ...

based on a 45 nanometer

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...

process. The Veer's own Snapdragon is composed, principally, of the Scorpion CPU, running at 800Mhz, an

Adreno Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in many of their SoCs. History Adreno (an anagram of AMD's graphic card brand '' Radeon''), was originally developed ...

205 GPU, a

digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on MOS integrated circuit chips. They are widely used in audio si ...

for cellular transmission/reception/processing (GSM, UMTS), gpsOne GPS module and an audio subsystem. The Scorpion core implements the ARMv7 architecture which is similar to the

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

Cortex-A8 The ARM Cortex-A8 is a 32-bit processor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture. Compared to the ARM11, the Cortex-A8 is a dual-issue superscalar design, achieving roughly twice the instructions per cycle. The Cort ...

and supports the

ARM NEON ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

instruction set extensions and VFPv3 floating-point extensions (both referred as the “VeNum” media processing engine on Scorpion) which can accelerate, for example, image processing (camera). The main purpose of the VeNum engine is to boost the performance of the Scorpion CPU during multimedia processing resulting in power saving. The same task will be completed faster and with less power being consumed on a processor with VeNum media processing engine than one without. The

205 GPU supports

OpenGL ES 2.0 OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-acce ...

, OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenVG 1.1, EGL 1.3,

Direct3D Mobile Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardwa ...

, SVGT 1.2 and

DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as m ...

Screen and input

The HP Veer has a 66 mm (2.6 inch) capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320 x 400 pixel. The touchscreen is designed for a bare finger, or multiple fingers for

multi-touch In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface (a touchpad or touchscreen) to recognize the presence of more than one somatosensory system, point of contact with the surface at the same time. The origins of multitouch began at CER ...

sensing. An accelerometer allows the orientation of the screen to change between portrait and landscape mode. There is a proximity sensor which deactivates the display and touchscreen when the device is brought near the face during a call. There is a slide-out 4-row QWERTY keyboard. The microphone is located on the slide-out keyboard.

Buttons

On the left side of the device, there is a volume button. On the upper right side, there is a power button. On the top side, there is a ringer switch for vibration mode.

Audio and USB connectivity

Both USB and 3.5 mm connectivities are provided by a proprietary magnetic connector.

Battery and SIM

The battery is rated at 910 mAh and is non-removable. HP states that it provides up to 5.0 hours of talk time or 300 hours of standby time.

Storage

There is 8 GB on board, of which about 6.5 GB is available to the user. There is no microSD card socket.

Software

The Veer shipped with either webOS 2.1.1 or 2.1.2 depending on region and has not seen an official update since. It has the following pre-installed applications. Android has unoffically been ported as well.

References

{{HP

Veer The Veer is an option running play often associated with option offenses in American football, made famous at the collegiate level by Bill Yeoman's Houston Cougars. It is currently run primarily on the high school level, with some usage at the ...

WebOS Smartphones Mobile phones with an integrated hardware keyboard