HP launches its Touchpad, Pre 3 and Veer devices

MOBILE GADGET UPSTART HP has released a trio of WebOS devices that it hopes will capture the mobile device market.

As leaked, HP revealed the Veer, Pre 3 smartphone and the Touchpad tablet along with an updated version of WebOS. The launch of the Pre 3 was the second since HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion last year, following that of the rather disappointing Pre 2.

Unlike with previous Palm devices, HP decided to go all out on the hardware, with both the Pre 3 and and Touchpad sporting high-end Qualcomm chips. The Pre 3 has a 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor while the Touchpad has a dual-core 1.2GHz chip. The firm highlighted the performance of the devices by playing Adobe Flash videos and showing off the multi-tasking capabilities of the WebOS operating system.

HP is pitching the Pre 3 as a business oriented smartphone that it expects to release sometime this Summer. It has a 3.6-inch 480x800 screen and 8GB or 16GB of memory and, HP claims, the widest keyboard on any WebOS phone to date. HP did not estimate battery life for the Pre 3 with the 1.4GHz Snapdragon chip.

It is unclear who exactly will want the Veer, a WebOS smartphone with a 2.6-inch screen that some at the event thought will be too small to use. The Veer has an 800MHz Snapdragon chip with 8GB of storage and, like the Pre 3, a slide-out keyboard. HP did not announce pricing or availability for the Veer.

Perhaps HP's least surprising announcement of all was the Touchpad. The tablet's design and the specifications were leaked ahead of the presentation and, while the device certainly looks the part with sleek lines, a dual core 1.2GHz chip, a 9.7-inch 1024x768 screen and 16GB or 32GB of storage, the projected Summer launch date and lack of pricing information tempered enthusiasm at the launch event.

HP took time to demonstrate the devices' abilities to communicate with each other and showed several examples of connectivity with secondary devices such as printers.

It was all very swish, but by the time HP ships the Pre 3 and the Touchpad, its competitors and in particular Apple might have incorporated many of their features anyway. µ