Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and in this video we're gonna talk about the software on the tiny miniscule HP veer 4G let's get to it okay so I've got both the pre 2 out and the veer 4G because we're going to compare them the the pre 3 has a faster processor 1 gigahertz with 512 megabytes of RAM whereas the veer 4G has an 800 megahertz processor with the same amount of RAM so presumably the pre 3 should be faster than the veer 4G in fact it should be the fastest webOS device out there right now until we get the pre 3 which comes out in the summer which ups the ante and across the board in terms of specifications but until that comes out we can compare against the Palm Pre 2 and they're both very spinny by the way so you might see them spin a little bit because they just have that kind of tapered edge design that makes the edges lift up so that there's a point of contact in the center so anyhow we'll turn these on and we're running sort of the same kind of apps so we can do a direct comparison and also see and get an understanding for the screen resolution of course webOS has that fantastic notification system pops up on the bottom when you don't want it you just flick it away and boom the screen expands to fit the entire area really awesome notification system that hasn't changed now on these devices we are running on webOS version 2.1 on the pre 2 and 2 point 1 point 2 here on the vote the veer 4G it's pretty much the same version of webOS 3.0 is shipping on the pre 3 but for now we have three two point one to work with here so let's go back to the home screens and of course webOS has some really fantastic gestures of really fresh interesting UI which they've kept what kept up with since the original pre and so what we have here is really the same thing set up I've got three of the same web pages in stacks stacks are really great for grouping together similar applications for example web pages here and over to the right there is a Google Maps entry and we can see how smooth scrolling is oddly it's choppy on both which is kind of strange they flip that card away and go into the web browser so here we are on Amazon can move around the page very smooth you can tell that you get to see more on the screen on the pre - because there's a higher resolution 480 pixels is the number you get 400 down on the veer for cheap 480 down on the pre 2 so you get a little bit more but it's really not that big of a deal where it gets kind of strange and this was the case with a pixie is pinch-to-zoom you really barely have any room to work with here whereas on the 3.1 inch display of the pre 2 you get a little bit more in terms of screen space so let's go back to the home screen and you can flick off individual tiles there and we can go into different websites pretty smooth performance to zoom in a little bit to get closer and so we can flick all these off the screen and let's just bring the veer 4G here now right now we're over h plus we're over the HSPA+ network on AT&T let's run a speed test to see what kind of speeds we get in theory you should be able to get up to about 14 megabits per second but AT&T never claims to be able to provide that according to them they're HSPA+ network should be able to do about 6 megabits per second down right now on a very good day so if we swipe over to the right and left and by the way these are all customizable panels we can rename them slide off the keyboard and call it you know games if that were the case okay and I have a games panel and this is all new to - webOS 2.1 or particularly 2.0 and we can also slide along these different items from screen to screen you can have one screen for games one screen for system settings and so on and so forth so let's go down to some benchmark utilities we have first one is called net speed we're going to use two of them because we don't have the standard speedtest.net application that we like to use when we test speeds on PocketNow so I hit start we've got full bars here and let's see what kind of download speeds we get over HSPA+ so this app is going to give us kind of a low reading which is why we're gonna test with another one we're getting around one point one point three there which is really 3G likes speeds right it's not the faster HSPA+ speeds and the upload speed this app actually doesn't even do upload speed or I actually there there it goes yeah but it doesn't really measure it very accurately so we're gonna flick this off the screen close that Abbe jump into the other one called net speed one that was overrated a little bit better in the the webOS App Catalog and it says we're over HSPA 4G scroll down we can do speed test and it's going to download a 10 megabyte file we were doing the largest file size possible to give the the data speed a chance to throttle up which sometimes is the case and it's almost done let's see what we get here in terms of download speeds very poor actually about 500 kilobits per second maybe less let's do that again because that seems to have been an anomaly and again it's running cut back in a sec and the results were that much better that time you know about you know 520 kilobits per second so not that great speeds on the veer 4G not sure if this is because of processing power because again AT&T is showing us an h+ here and we're not actually on the h+ network or on 3g that could be the case that is our best guess but don't expect to get blazing fast speeds on the veer 4G it's got the 4G branding to it but that doesn't really mean much in this case as we're finding so let's open up a bunch of cards here and just kind of keep it going to see how many cards we can add before things get very slow real quick got a play game of Angry Birds Angry Birds on the veer for G's tiny screen is totally usable but it's it's a little bit strange okay so here we go and we're off this is the free version anyway so I'm gonna leave that running in the background because this is webOS of course we can have these cards open and let's open say the dialer okay there's the dialer by the way same as any other webOS device and we can open the weather channel which has kulap the fat load while we do sky climber kind of a bouncy like game and keep going and see what we can do in terms of getting this thing to to get slow so we've got the camera open which is always a little bit intense we can go to the calendar just keep going here open up different apps see what performance is going to be like after we have lots of apps open it's keeping up quite nicely as you can see so let's dive into a particular website we're going to go up here and go to bookmarks alright go to pocketnow.com we'll go to the full version and see how long that takes to load doesn't really make sense to compare this against an Android phone a lot of the Android phones now have dual-core processors they're pretty darn fast and it's loading right now and actually gonna turn on Wi-Fi just so we can get the fastest speed possible okay there we go and we'll put that back starting to slow down as you can see but again we have a lot of apps open so it's connecting to Wi-Fi it's thinking it's trying to access pocket now and let's close some cards that might actually help it a little bit so we're pressing the little capacitive button so it's really not me to multitask this heavy I mean most webOS users are going to have maybe two or three apps open at one time in fact most webOS users that I know will actually keep all apps closed at all times just to keep the the battery life as strong as possible and also to make the device feel as fast as possible so we're trying to load pocket now again it looks like we're having some problems with the server alright and we're back we had to reboot the device it froze and the internet connection kind of stopped working so we're loading pocket now right now we've got flash elements turned off and we can kind of get a sense for how long it takes to load pocket and all this is the desktop version it's kind of complex a lot of images a lot of things to load you can watch the little spinny thing here and determine when it's ready flick down the page quickly we get some checkerboards unfortunately but it eventually keeps up once the webpage is loaded into memory we've no other apps open right now just this particular webpage which is loading of course while it's loading we can jump into other apps with webOS you can slide your finger up from the bottom and open up a wide variety of apps that you've added to your dock the for apps not a wide variety you only get a choice of four so we'll stop it there and just move around on the page and go into landscape eventually one of these days so the the veer is is still underpowered as you can see it becomes unresponsive at times and we just have one thing open here it's a web page can pinch to zoom it's relatively smooth it gets a little bit choppy at times but overall pretty good in terms of moving around on the screen and we can put it as a card and then we can flick it off the screen now let's jump back into the application tray I guess we could call and see what apps we have pre-loaded here on the veer 4G most of it is stock to webOS but there's some added things from 18t like a teen teen navigator which you have to pay for YP mobile which you could have downloaded from the App Catalog anyhow photo gallery memos music kind of the standard stuff and down here are a lot of things that I have added good to see the New York Times have an application in the webOS Catalog speaking of the catalogue let's jump into the catalog and see how it is right now it's not nearly as big it's a fraction of the size of the Android App Store and of the iOS App Store but it's it's getting there slowly over time it's got most of the major apps covered like New York Times like Angry Birds like The Weather Channel most of the major apps are covered they're sort of the the more niche apps you're not going to find in the palm app catalog at this point because there just haven't been enough webOS devices sold to make developers excited about developing for the web OS platform so the app catalog the App Store is coming along but it's still not there yet and who knows if it will ever get there beyond the built in apps webOS is starting to feel a little bit dated it's a mere 2 years old kind in actually about a couple of days June 6 2009 was when webOS was was first talked about and it wasn't until a little bit later that the Prix came out but compared to the other operating systems out there you feel a little bit limited I mean this paradigm of having the app cards take place on your desktop is a really cool feature but all of the other operating systems can multitask in a way that is more out of sight and out of mind an Android you tap it hold the home button in iOS you double tap the home button you can quickly jump in and out of applications the problem here is that in webOS you can't use your desktop your home screen for anything all you have are these cards and for applications and if you want to get to more applications you have to jump into the app tray most people use more than four applications on a regular basis maybe six of them or eight or ten and with iOS and with Android you can put them on your home screen and Android you can add widgets and webOS all you get are these cards now also new to webOS 2.0 but we saw this in in the pre two is the just type so when you're on your home screen some added functionality here you slide out the keyboard and you type you know iPhone right and it will start searching everything whether it's Google or Google Maps or applications on your phone for iPhone which is a nice little feature but you get the same kind of thing in iOS if you swipe to the to the right and in Android if you if you go into the Google search widget it's nothing new nothing that interesting just a little piece of added functionality so the experience on webOS is good the menu system has always been very elegant very nice in webOS it just looks very polished and refined all the sliders are pretty the toggle switches look great the drop downs the way that the operating system shows you where you've tapped on the screen all is really really nice it's just a matter of evolving the software getting it to a point where it's truly competitive not only competitive but innovative when compared against the other offerings out there so webOS is what you expect it to be on the HP veer 4G it's a little bit slow it's doesn't fix that problem of being laggy when it's loading a big website or slowing down and you have a lot of apps open it's a pleasant operating system it's not made for power users at this moment in time hopefully when the pre three comes out that story will change a little bit as that will have more power under the hood we'll have a full review of the veer 4G on pocket now coming up soon if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now