HP Veer Review: Awwwww

Holy shit this phone is adorable. I feel like I’m bear-hugging it with my hand every time I hold it.

WHY IT MATTERS
I can fit the Veer entirely inside of my mouth. While it’s significant that it’s the first phone produced by the corpse of Palm (now possessed by HP in every sense of the word) and a spritely revivification of the musty webOS platform, the only thing I really care about is that it’s tiny, compact, and ingeniously so. Which doesn’t sound like much of a novelty, except that phones are now like penises: everybody’s fighting to have the biggest one.

USING IT
Size matters. A lot. The Veer’s screen is 2.6 inches diagonally, which is a little more than half the functional real estate you get on the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. Pinch, flick, zoom, scroll. Get used to those actions. You’ll be doing them a lot. If webOS wasn’t so utterly thoughtful, from the way it handles multitasking to notifications to the insta-app-launching “Just Type” feature, it’d be a hand-cramping, eye-scrunching disaster. (I would cry blood if somebody made me use an Android phone with a screen this size.) It’s usable, yes – but not for everybody.

Fingernails. They’re the trick to typing on the sub-Rice-Bubble sized keys that emerge once the Veer splits open. That action, btw, feels totally sturdy and amazing, unlike past Palm products. HP money at work. An on-screen keyboard, so you don’t have to open the Veer every time you want to type, would be a nice addition, though. The magnetic tumor that pulls double duty for USB connections and audio out is both genius (well-designed) and annoying (proprietary ports are a world of trouble).

LIKEY
So small! WebOS still feels amazingly well-designed and thoughtful. The battery life is the best I’ve experienced on a Palm device, the first one to last all day. Did I mention it’s tiny? (I realise this section looks much smaller than proceeding one, but that’s what it comes down to: WebOS is super easy to use, and it’s hard not to love this cleverly designed, littlest of smartphones.)

NO LIKEY
WebOS may damn well be clever, but it is damn slow too. Far slower and less responsive than it should be, at any rate, considering it’s got the same guts as the much beefier G2. More often than not, plotting your course by the stars would be quicker than launching Google Maps. Sometimes the phone just goes plain catatonic while you stand by, tapping and swiping. When it awakens, it bursts into a seizure of activity from your past swipes. Oh, and where are the apps? WebOS’s app catalog feels like one of those half-abandoned mega-condos left along the Williamsburg waterfront, post-recession. Also, I really hate AT&T’s stupid 4G branding on it. This doesn’t feel like the future of connectivity, by any stretch. Mediocre camera.

SHOULD I BUY IT?
You know that girl down at the far end of the bar wearing the glasses just quirky enough that you can’t help but falling totally in love, even after talking to her for 15 seconds reveals that she is completely and utterly incompatible with every single aspect of your life, every one of your tastes in music, movies and people? That’s the Veer. You can buy it, and love it for 15 (or 20) seconds even as you try to stop yourself, but you’ll probably regret it in the morning. Maybe you won’t, but not everybody’s as tolerant as you are. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be worth waking up with after it’s upgraded to webOS 3.0 this (northern) summer. I hope so. But promises and hopes to be better are just that: promises and hopes.