UPDATED 13:08 EDT / FEBRUARY 09 2011

HP webOS Event Underway: Announced Palm Pre 3, Veer, Touchpad

palm-pre-3 As we all may know by now, Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm last summer to the smoking tune of $1.2 billion and we’ve been looking forward to HP putting them to good use. Today, HP is holding a press conference covering just that. Mike Melanon over at ReadWriteWeb has some excellent coverage of the opening gestures of the event—underway about 2 hours ago—and things are already looking quite attention grabbing,

The theme for the conference, whose tagline is "Think Big. Think Small. Think Beyond," is connected experiences. Some devices are better at content consumption, while others are for content creation – this according to HP exec Todd Bradley, VP in the company’s Personal Systems group. He made these comments during a CNBC interview last month, where he teased the news of the forthcoming HP iPad competitor. Today, the teasing ends and HP gives up the goods on what it has planned next to take on the iPhone, the iPad and the Android army. Stay tuned for our live coverage of the event.

The big announcements of the day happen to include the Palm Pre 3, Veer, and Touchpad Tablet, HP’s answer to their biggest tablet competitor Apple and their iPad, who are already rumored planning their next-gen tablet, the iPad 2.

The Palm Pre 3 is a slide-out QWERTY device that looks quite similar to the iPhone running a full stock of webOS and provides a wide range of features. Few details exist about its inner workings, but it touts to be an excellent successor to the Palm Pre 2. There’s also suggestion that all of these webOS devices (Palm Pre 3, Veer, and Touchpad) will be able to communicate and integrate systems with one another (perhaps when in proximity?)

The Veer has been revealed to be another slide-out QWERTY keyboard device, 2.6” 320×400 touch display, gesture area, full Adobe Flash, GPS, and a camera. From the looks of it, it’s a touch-device almost the size of a credit-card, although I doubt anyone would put this into their wallet (it’s probably quite costly and likely a little fragile for its form factor.)

According to Rubinstein, senior VP and GM of Palm, both the Veer and Pre 3 will possess an odd screensaver behavior when they’re charging on Touchstone charging pads that will cause them to slideshow their photo albums. Like Melanson’s quip in his article, I hope I get to choose which album, because I don’t know that I’d like every image to appear while I’m charging my phone. (Perhaps I’ll just go with some daily animé motif to fit my personality.)

The new HP Touchpad seems to have a number of interesting advancements: running the newest webOS version; keyboard with number row; easy integration with QuickOffice, Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net; VPN ready; with full Adobe Flash; and synch-able with music collections (well, it is trying to rival the iPad, and Apple has music collections down to an artform.)

The Touchpad also has an “exhibition mode” when charging on the Touchstone and displays upcoming appointments, events, alarms, etc.

The conference coverage is still ongoing, but it looks like HP has some powerful plans for these devices, I look forward to unwrapping one and getting a chance to report on the nitty-gritty guts for everyone.


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