MWC 2011: HP overview

HP had their announcements out of the way a few days before the actual start of the MWC so we can now skip straight to the hands-on experience. The powerful Pre 3 and the cute little Veer were both in attendance and happy to pose for our camera.

Here the two are together. You can get an idea of them, size-wise.

The HP Pre 3 and Veer

We also got a glimpse of the HP Touchpad tablet, though it was fixed to a desk so we couldn't quite enjoy the full experience.

On a side note, the Palm logo was nowhere to be seen at the booth so we guess we can officially start getting used to calling the whole thing HP.

HP Pre 3

The HP Pre 3 is a marvelously performing device with a taste for multitasking. Needless to say, its pebble shape makes it fit perfectly in any hand.

HP Pre 3 hands-on photos

As is to be expected from a device with a 1.4 GHz CPU, the Pre 3 is a silky-smooth performer. Multitasking is what webOS really loves to do so having quite a few "cards" running in the background doesn't slow things down at all.

webOS is one of the most user-friendly and nicely looking platforms on the market and if HP manage to get that application store of theirs up to speed they might be back up there with Android and iOS.

HP Pre 3 hands-on photos

The QWERTY keyboard is pretty comfortable, though we couldn't achieve the same typing speed on the oval keys as on a BlackBerry Bold. Still, the overall ergonomics of the Pre 3 are quite good and with little practice even long emails will be breeze.

We could have used a virtual QWERTY for those cases when you need to input just a few symbols, but that's not the webOS way.

In general, we are very impressed with the Pre 3 and we find it to be the right choice of device to mark HP's return to the smartphone business.