Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branagh Minnemann from pocketnow.com the HP beer is the smallest smartphone on the planet it's selling right now on AT&T for $50 in your choice of black or white in this video we're gonna talk about the hardware on this tiny little cute phone known as the veer 4G let's get to it okay so before jumping into hardware let's talk about specifications we've got an 800 megahertz processor with 512 megabytes of RAM that's certainly an upgrade from the lower specs that you found on the pixie and the pixie Plus which really seemed like underpowered devices they were slow when it came to multitasking and web browsing they would ask off often freeze which was quite annoying so hopefully we get better results from the veer 4G which is considered to be the true true successor to the pixie and the pixie plus we've got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth HSPA+ for faster download speeds category 10 which means in theory you should be able to get fourteen point four megabits per second down but of course those are theoretical speeds you probably can't get anywhere near that in the real world we're going to talk about speeds in an upcoming video we've got a five megapixel camera on the back unfortunately no flash back there which is kind of annoying the screen is super tiny 2.6 inches the resolutions 400 down by 320 across and although this isn't fair we're going to take out the samsung galaxy s2 here which of course has a screen much much larger 4.3 inches and let's just flip these on real quick and you're gonna get a sense for exactly how these compare so I've actually got pocket now loaded on both and click onto that and obviously you're not going to carry a phone with a large screen like this next to a veer which has a tiny screen you're just gonna have a veer right so you're not gonna notice how small the screen is unless you're comparing side to side like this but you can really get the sense for the difference in screen size and also the quality of the screen the the veer 4G has an LCD panel whereas the galaxy s2 a Super AMOLED plus so you don't get that super great contrast but that really wasn't a selling point of the veer 4G they didn't claim to have tremendously amazing screen the screen is crisp and clear or talk more about it in an upcoming video colors look good contrast as good of course it's hard to beat this the Galaxy S two's Super AMOLED plus display so let's move that away and move around the device and talk about what we have and we also learned a very important lesson about the vir 4G you're going to talk about in a sec on the side of the device here we've got the volume up and down rocker kind of nicely adorned in Chrome on the top we've got a little lanyard loop and here is the SIM card slot now you might be thinking well isn't the SIM card slot behind the battery cover well obviously it's not it's on the top here and what you have to do is Jam your finger in there and you get to the SIM card slot now a word of warning do not and I repeat do not try to remove the back battery cover on the veer 4G previous palm devices or HP devices this case palm-like the pixi had a removable backing right so you can access the battery get to everything back there and even the pre 2 on AT&T you could pop off the battery cover so that you can change batteries if you want right you can change the SIM card not the case with the veer 4G if you try to remove the back battery cover you're going to break something like I did if we look over here ouch this piece very thin piece of plastic if bent or mango the wrong way is going to permanently Bend like that fortunately this this blemish hasn't altered the functionality of the device it still works great but just a word of warning for those of you thinking about getting this device do not try to remove the back battery cover I know a lot of people don't read the user manual like like me sometimes but just take that warning seriously over here we've got a silent switch which is nice it's been on palm devices since the earliest pomme smartphones very nice to have got the nice power standby here in the upper right corner and then this thing which we just were looking at a second ago there is no mini USB or micro USB port on this device and there's also no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack what you have to do is get this little adapter for a 3.5 millimeter and prick Euler it sucks on there real easily kind of annoying that you have to have this extremity on the device and this doesn't impact the slider by the way it just slides nicely with it we'll talk about the keyboard in a second it's just annoying to have to remember an accessory and it's pretty secure although if you give it a little bit of a twist it will eventually fall off naturally and then the other part of this is the power cables so you can't charge with usual microUSB which is kind of annoying last weekend I was away from the office I didn't have this thing so the the V or 4G went dead because I couldn't charge it with my usual micro USB cable so that snaps right on charges the device the battery is about 900 milliamp hours and although that's small it's enough to power the vir 4G for for quite a while thanks to the small screen and 800 megahertz processor so let's take that off and keep moving around the device again we've got the 5 megapixel camera here with a speaker and no flash HP branding no palm branding to be found AT&T logo on the bottom and let's talk about this keyboard the pixi had a super-duper clicky keyboard which was great people really liked that and even though the keys were super tiny I put a pen next to it so you can see the keyboard was very very usable and the same is the case with the veer 4G and if we take out the pre 2 I'm gonna pop that back battery cover back on we can see that the keyboards are basically identical in terms of layout so all the buttons are in the same place what's different is that the keys on the beer 4G probably 20 to 30 percent smaller but again Palm webOS devices are have very very usable keyboards so if we go over it here it just feels really good whether you big hands are small hands just something about the keyboard is really really good and it makes a lot of sense to pack a smaller keyboard in a smaller device here so let's close that of course the webOS device so we've got this capacitive button here that'll take you back to the home screen or you can use it as a back button lots of other functions like that too we're gonna talk all about software in an upcoming video build quality is very good except for the fact that something can break if you attempt to take off the back battery cover but to be fair if you read the user manual you'll find out that that's not how you get to the SIM card slot and you're it's not meant to have a user replaceable battery like all of the other palm devices which is kind of frustrating so overall very good build quality feels good in hand has a good weight and balance like all of the other webOS devices that have the slide down keyboard and unlike early webOS devices which had problems with a slider the veer forging was very very tight it doesn't look like it's going to fatigue after a long period of time it's spring-assisted most of the way what there goes and not that strong in terms of spring of the spring systems but pretty darn good so those look at the hardware on the fear 4G it is tiny it is small compared to other phones it looks kind of ridiculous but if you're looking for a small microphone with high level of build quality this is a great phone to get and we're going to talk all about software and whether the higher specs the faster processor the more RAM really makes a difference in day-to-day use so if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if there's something particular you want to see about the HPV or 4G drop us a comment thanks for watching that's it for now