HP Veer 4G Review - Getting Us Excited for Pre 3
by Brian Klug on June 7, 2011 5:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HP
- AT&T
- Palm
- veer
- webOS
- HSPA+
- Mobile
- HP Veer 4G
Compared to the Pixi and even the Palm Pre Plus, the Veer offers a dramatic difference in speed and smoothness. Unfortunately the Pixi lacks WiFi so running our webpage loading suite didn’t make much sense, however I timed application loads between the Pixi, Veer, and Pre Plus. There’s a dramatic difference between the older ARMv6 Pixi and the newer ARMv7 Veer. Again the Veer runs an 800 MHz MSM7230 with 512 MB of LPDDR RAM.
Application Launch Time Benchmarking | |||||||
Application / Launch Time (s) | Palm Pre Plus | Palm Pixi | HP Veer 4G | ||||
Maps | 15.3 | 20.1 | 7.1 | ||||
Camera | 4.5 | 5.0 | 3.6 | ||||
Memos | 4.0 | 4.5 | 2.7 | ||||
Web | 3.3 | 2.5 | 2.1 | ||||
Clock | 5.0 | 3.8 | 3.3 | ||||
Startup | 2:19.1 | - | 1:39.9 |
The difference in raw, perceptible performance difference between the Veer and everything that came before it (save the Pre 2) is huge. Animations are completely fluid, typing fast no longer results in dramatic lag, and there’s no longer huge stalls in responsiveness. WebOS 2.0 also seems to have better memory management – I opened nearly 100 cards with AnandTech.com fully loaded and never once got an out of memory error. I did notice huge amounts of memory being swapped to disk (it’s very easy to monitor using top over novaterm on the Veer), but the device continued being fully responsive.
Unfortunately loading times on the Veer are still incredibly long due to some mismanagement of the linux boot process. Unfortunately it appears that WebOS increases the sleep time that apps send to the caller during the boot process from an already crazy 60 seconds to 120 seconds. There’s discussion of this on WebOS Internals, but the situation is even worse now, at 120 seconds.
This is somewhat masked with much faster hardware, yet I have very little doubt that the Pre 3 will take an inexcusably long time to boot as the Veer and every WebOS device that came before it.
We also ran the standard web benchmarks on all three devices. Results are comparable here but not entirely - WebKit remains 532.2 between both versions of WebOS, but it's clear that a newer JavaScript engine is being used in WebOS 2.0, possibly V8 which Qualcomm works closely to maintain and optimize for OEMs. What we’re seeing here however does translate to a perceptible performance delta.
Whereas the Pixi is essentially laggy to the point of unusable, so much so that I honestly wonder how the device was ever considered releasable, the Veer is completely fluid.
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cptnjarhead - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I'm am excited for the pre 3.Veer is way to small for me and my pre + oc'd @ 1ghz will keep me happy till the pre 3 comes out.
WebOS is the best in mop. My wife has the same phone and this is the first smart phone that i haven't had to constantly show her how to use it :)
trust me, if you have never used WebOS, just try it and you will be amazed how great it is.
vshah - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
Have you guys stopped including these as a standard part of the reviews?Brian Klug - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
We haven't, however as I noted there's no way to get RSSI out of the Veer.-Brian
theinvisibleduck - Monday, June 27, 2011 - link
I bought my wife one (she wanted a small phone) neither of us believed it would be big enough when I got it, but we were both pleasantly suprised! It is excellent and you do not notice that it is small (except yesterday when I lost it in my pocket and my wife and I had a heated discussion about who lost it before I started digging through my pants pocket and found it). I would HIGHLY recommend trying this awesome little device out I think you will be very pleasantly suprised like I was.CellPig - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
This phone is adorable, ha. I'm very skeptical of it making it in a big phone market though. HP has such a small stance in the smart phone market to begin with and I'm not sure if this phone will get them moving in the right direction, regardless of how cool it is. I used to have a webOS device, but I switched to Android and then to Apple, each time gaining more access to things that mattered. We're actually stumped over whether or not we should stock accessories for this phone at http://CellPig.com - Anyone have thoughts/suggestions?