AT&T has a pair of opposites available as the carrier launches today the Samsung Infuse 4G with a huge 4.5 inch display, and the HP Veer 4G which has a petite 2.6 inch screen. The price of each device is as different as the screen is on both models. The Veer 4G is $99.99 with a signed 2-year contract while the Infuse goes for $199.99 with a signed 2 year pact. For those of you who like to pay nothing for a brand new smartphone, Best Buy is offering the HP Veer 4G for the price of zero with a brand new contract.

The pair also has a diverse offering of operating systems. The Samsung Infuse 4G has Android 2.2 on board while the HP Veer 4G is the third webOS handset following the Pre and the Pixi. The version of the OS on the Veer is webOS 2.0.

So regardless if you have big or tiny hands, AT&T has a new smartphone for you that will fit your palm perfectly. And that is the, uh, long and short of it.

source: AT&T (Infuse 4G), (Veer 4G)

It’s hard to say right now whether or not we’re fond of the HP Veer 4G’s price tag of $99.99, but thankfully though, we’re sure that it’s going to get a much needed price chop by some retailers.

Rightfully so, Best Buy appears content to offer pre-orders for the beloved and cute looking webOS powered device, but more importantly, they’re going to sell the handset for free with a contract when it comes out. Apparently it seems that only the white version of the handset will be sold at stores, while both the black and white models will be sold online. Obviously, if you intend on picking up the handset, you can plunk down $50 to get yourself situated with a pre-order – which is then refunded to you in the form of a $50 gift card.

So when the 15th comes along, you can stroll right into your local Best Buy store and pick up your prized possession – and then use that $50 on something else to tastefully complement your new purchase.

source: PreCentral

At the brink of a near death experience, it seemed that Palm was nearing an untimely death seeing that its lineup of webOS devices were unable to achieve that mass stardom needed to keep it competing healthily. Fortunately for them, they’re now part of a much larger company in HP, and with their mighty presence in the consumer electronics market, they’re hoping to experience smooth sailing with webOS once again.

As we near its expected May 15th launch date, the $99.99 on-contract HP Veer 4G is shaping up to be a decent entry to showcase the relevance that’s surrounding webOS once again. Taking a look at its retail packaging, with its familiar white and orange theme, it’s more than evident that it’s an HP product – and not something from Palm. On the front, an accurate image of the diminutive device is splashed right on there to really give a telling of how compact this handset really is. Inside, we’re presented with the usual set of documentation, SIM card, proprietary USB cable, wall charger, and 3.5mm headset adapter. Sadly though, it’s rather a shame to see it side with a proprietary data/power port – as opposed to using the usual microUSB connection. Moreover, you’ll need to be careful to not lose that 3.5mm headset adapter, which engineers could not integrate with the handset itself…

Read the whole story at PhoneArena.com!

Gartner is a well-trusted tech oracle, but when it comes to predicting events in a 5-year timeframe, predictions become largely equivalent to palm-reading. Well, there might be one exception – tablets. Apple has basically created the tablet market with the original iPad and Gartner’s latest prognosis says that Cupertino is to remain the dominant company. But even Steve Jobs won’t be able to sustain the overwhelming popularity that the iPad is enjoying nowadays – the tablet’s share will slip to some 69% this year and continue falling to around 47% in 2015.

Google’s Android Honeycomb has the support of pretty much every other manufacturer out there, but this – in Gartner’s views – won’t prove enough for a quick start. Honeycomb tablets are to conquer the market gradually, starting from a 14% share in 2010, to reach nearly 20% this year and sprinting to the finish to close the gap with almost 39% in 2015.

The other major contender out there seems to be RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. The 7-inch tablet holds ground with its business allure and QNX-based platform, but it will encounter one major obstacle on its way – apps. Nevertheless, Gartner forecasts bright future for the tablet which will supposedly occupy 5.6 of the market this year, only to reach the healthy 10% in 2015. But finally, HP’s TouchPad will face the most difficulties. Gartner’s predictions speak for a slow start for the tablet which will finish 2015 with a weak 3% presence.

Just last week, the analysts from Gartner presented us with their 5-year perspective on the cell phone market, but it was a whole different story with Android on top of the charts and Windows Phone picking up pace. Microsoft’s OS, somewhat surprisingly, is not even in the forecast here, which makes us think that we might see a whole new model to reflect the three-horse race that Redmond wants to stage. Whatever the future brings, one thing is certain – the market will be a very competitive one and this is always good for the end-user.

source: Gartner via mocoNews

The battle of the heavyweights has officially been staged – the Apple iPad 2 is the successor to the original iPad, which dominated the tablet segment in the last year, but the new contenders appear with an equally mighty dual-core muscle and tailor-made Android Honeycomb not breaking a sweat under its power.

The iPad 2 comes with a lot of swagger – Cupertino is saying that with it the company aims to retain a nearly 80% market share in 2011. Honeycomb on the other side comes in a variety of tablets like the already released Motorola XOOM and the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. But it’s not the only one who wants a piece of the tablet pie as the webOS-based HP TouchPad is expected to make an appearance in the Summer months.

We shouldn’t omit the rest of the tablets out there, but it seems that most of them fall in a slightly different category by either having a smaller screen or not having the type of carrier support these heavyweight will get. That – of course – doesn’t make them less of a capable rival to the iPad, but for the time being let’s focus on the biggest ones and see who wins in the first round where we clash the specs!

Hewlett-Packard and Palm just announced their smallest webOS device, the HP Veer. The tiny munchkin has a 2.6″ 320×400 pixels display, plus a small slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

The phone is “about the size of a credit card“, and has a Qualcomm 7230 Snapdragon processor, clocked at 800 MHz. It’s the same one we have in the T-Mobile G2, folks, so this tiny phone shouldn’t complain from lack of power, since the chipset is built with the 45nm technology. Whether the 2.6″ display will provide bearable screen real estate though remains to be seen.

There is a a 5MP camera, plus all the goodies expected from a modern smartphone, like Wi-Fi, GPS, microUSB port, Bluetooth and audio jack. It will run on HSPA+ networks, like AT&T and T-Mobile.

The HP Veer has 8GB of built-in storage, and same memory as the Palm Pre 2, 512MB RAM. Look for the tiny webOS 2.2 phone in the Spring. Sadly, it was not specified on which network the bite-size HP Veer will appear, or how much it will cost.

source: HP

Yesterday we showed you some pictures supposedly of the new Palm Pre 2.0. from French carrier SFR. Today, MobiFrance has revealed some new pictures of the phone that shows a few things in the way of cosmetic changes from the original version. Most of what is new in the handset is under the hood and are things we reported on Monday.

Will the total package be enough for this phone to survive? If you had taken a poll in early 2009, webOS and the Palm Pre would have hands down been considered the most likely model to challenge the Apple iPhone. No one could have predicted what eventually happened with the birth of Androidmania this past November. Now with the OS and the hardware considered practically an afterthought, can an amazing comeback happen?
source: MobiFrance

The addictive game Angry Birds is now available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus. Available in the Palm App Catalog for $2, your Pre must have the latest version of webOS, 1.4.5, under the hood. According to a press release issued by Palm, Angry Birds will be made available for Pixi owners later. The game’s creator, Rovio, had asked the webOS community if they wanted the game for their platform and the response was extremely positive.

For those Rip Van Winkle types who are not familiar with the multi-level game, using a slingshot you launch birds-each with a different power-toward a number of green pigs protected by wood or stone housing. Spurred on by the massive success of the game on the iPhone and iPod, the developers want to put the game on other platforms. While the game is among the top selling apps in over 60 countries, so far Android users have been shut out.
source: Palm

While Germany’s O2 is the only carrier to officially offer the webOS 1.4.5 upgrade to its customers, and AT&T owners will probably be the last to receive it, a self-proclaimed “Sprint employee” tells the PreCentral forum that webOS 1.4.5.1 will be available from Sprint on July 7th after most European carriers will have already made 1.4.5 available to customers. On the Palm site, it does let us know what changes to expect from this download, mostly some repairs to minor problems. On the browser, for example, if you enter text on certain web pages, the screen focus now will remain on the text being entered. The upgrade will also correct a rare problem that prevented some podcasts from downloading correctly and addresses several security issues with the software. The forum writing “Sprint employee” also dropped a few more items that the upgrade will bring to Sprint users such as fixing the e-mail so that the Sprint branded e-mail default signature is correctly branded. There will be some improvement to battery life and videos will be able to get sent via multimedia messaging. Sprint TV will have a couple of changes with an upgrade to version 3.5.4 and parental controls will be enhanced. Meanwhile, Palm has made the webOS 1.4.5 SDK available to all developers including the just out of beta PDK. The upgrade will allow 3D gaming PDK apps to be supported by the Palm Pixi.
source: PreCentralForums, Phonescoop

Beginning to intermediate webOS developers are getting a jump start courtesy of AT&T, which has secured Josh Marinacci from Palm’s Developer Relations, for a webinar scheduled to air on 6/17, 10-11am PST. What’s more, the attendees of “An Introduction to Palm webOS” are being enticed with a raffle for an AT&T smartphone.

So anybody who wants to further their webOS development skills, or learn how to port their applications to the platform, can head over to the AT&T Developer Program website and signup. How many gadgets will webOS end up powering after Palm’s acquisition by HP, is anybody’s guess, but there is a decent chance of it getting to more and more devices.
source: PreCentral