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

That’s a nice segue into how typing on the Veer goes. It’s surprisingly easy to peck out SMSes and emails on the Veer despite its size. I can get both thumbs on the keyboard and type fairly easily, as long as I use my fingernails to press on the key domes rather than the fleshy part of the thumb. 

While errant key-presses are definitely the norm, the situation is mitigated rather well by the inclusion of autocorrect in WebOS 2.0, which works impressively well at most words. It’s called Text Assist in WebOS 2.0. If you type a word incorrectly and have done a decent enough job to get most of the characters right, it’ll autocorrect and get underlined with dashed grey dots. If you’re too far away from a commonly misspelled word, it’ll be underlined in dashed red just like every other word processing program. 

This can then be tapped on revealing a number of correction options, and for the most part it does a decently good job. If you type a word that isn’t in the dictionary, it will likewise be underlined in red (or, annoyingly enough, autocorrected), and then tapping on it will make a pop up with “+” prepended to the word, symbolizing the option to add it to the autocorrect dictionary. 

My only complaint about WebOS’ autocorrect implementation is that unlike iOS and Android, there isn’t a fast way to tell the keyboard software that you really did mean to type “pwned” instead of “owned,” and to leave it spelled how the keyboard software thinks is wrong. Sometimes you can get into a tug of war, where successive backspaces correct back to the “misspelled” word you want, but then typing more yields the correction. It’s just unnerving occasionally. 

Where WebOS’ autocorrection beats iOS is that it (thankfully) allows easy entry of words into the autocorrection dictionary without making you encounter it in real use. Instead there’s a menu for both adding user defined words and autocorrection shortcuts. Oddly enough I had to add HSPA, HSPA+, and the Veer’s own name to the dictionary pretty much immediately since they weren’t present by default. HPalm is being way too modest if they’re not including all their product names in the autocorrection corpus - every other smartphone I’ve played with seems to include every one of the manufacturer’s products in its own correction corpus. As an added leg up on the competition, the autocorrection dictionary on the Veer includes the full spectrum of insults and swear words. It won’t correct to these words, but they thankfully aren’t marked as being misspelled.

The next discussion point about the Veer’s keyboard is tactile feel. Honestly the Veer’s keyboard doesn’t feel as good as the Pixi’s, even when my comparison point is a very used loved Palm Pixi. The keys on the Veer are considerably more mushy and accommodating, which is accentuated by both the mushy plastic material used for the domes, and a lethargic click mechanism. The Pixi on the other hand has rigid domes that click much more decisively, and as an end result yields a much more confident typing experience. When it comes to physical keyboards, I think communication is the big issue. Honestly, the Veer’s keyboard feels a lot more like a aspect-scaled Palm Pre keyboard than the Pixi’s keyboard which is laid out in a very rectangular fashion. The keys on the Pixi are also slightly taller than those on the Veer. 

Anand used the word communication in a discussion with me about driving, and it got me thinking about how the same can be said about the haptic experience of typing. Two things need to be communicative on a physical keyboard for it to be great - the first is that the key tops need to be easy to feel for positioning one’s fingers atop the appropriate keys for alignment. The second is that the key dome mechanisms need to click in a way that communicates successful character presses. If either of those things isn’t right, typing on the keyboard will never quite be full-speed. The Veer gets the first one right (the domes are convex, easy to locate, and the F character has a recognizable bump), but only is middling at the second one - there’s just a tad too much travel.

I know I sound like I’m ripping on the Veer’s keyboard, but in practice I didn’t find myself want for more physical area or a larger keyboard, just slightly firmer domes and clicking. The presence of autocorrect in WebOS 2.0 catches about 80% of my typing mistakes when going super fast, which is respectable. That said, if you have large fingers, couldn’t type on the Pixi, or even found the Pre keyboard frustrating, then the Veer is likely going to be less than ideal for you.