HP Veer 4G Review - Getting Us Excited for Pre 3

The Veer continues the WebOS tradition of having a fixed focus 'enhanced depth of field' camera. The Veer is simultaneously an improvement and step backwards from the Pixi just on paper. The Veer has a 5 MP camera with no LED flash. For comparison, the Palm Pixi has a 2 MP camera with LED flash. 

Both cameras are of the fixed focus sort. The Veer captures still images at 2592 x 1952 with filesizes of just around 2 MB in JPEG format. WebOS continues to take the minimalist approach in the camera application with virtually no toggles other than a link to the gallery, a capture button, and a switch for changing between video capture and stills. For being such a basic camera, the Veer produces some surprisingly decent stills when you're outside in good daylight. Beyond the camera's admittedly close hyperfocal distance, there's good focus and sharpness. 

Indoors or inside that hyperfocal distance, the Veer's camera is very disappointing. You can see that behavior in a few of the gallery shots that aren't part of our test suite but just taken in daily use. In those situations that are low light, at night, or close to the device, the Veer doesn't perform well. That's to be expected however given the camera constraints. 

The camera application on the Veer is far and away the most buggy part of the experience. With geotagging enabled, I suffered a number of constant problems. Sometimes I'd get errors like this:

Other times I'd simply get a complete abrupt reboot of the device, or some very troubling screen corruption followed by a reboot either immediately or a few minutes later. When things were going very badly, the Veer would capture a ton of 0 KB images - lovely. Disabling geotagging fixed the problem entirely - just don't enable it if you want a functioning camera. 

Videos on the Veer are captured at a decidedly last-generation 640 x 480 (VGA), and are encoded with MPEG-4 at a bitrate of exactly 1 Mbps with one AAC audio channel. I'm disappointed that there isn't 720P video capture on the Veer - MSM7230 should be more than capable of doing that instead of low bitrate VGA. 

The nice thing is that for the most part you can still mash the capture button or spacebar endlessly and capture tons of images quickly. This is one thing WebOS still has on everyone else - stupid fast capture with virtually no input lag. The downside is again that WebOS hasn't caught up in the video or camera side of things - everyone else is busy duking it out over 720P and 1080P capture quality, while the Veer putters on with VGA. For those interested, I've uploaded the two video samples taken from the Veer here.