HP has announced the HP Veer, a compact smartphone that makes up for its size with a lot of features. How small is it? The size of a credit card and about as thick as a deck of cards. It runs webOS 2, with support for Adobe Flash, has a small screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Other features include an 800MHz processor, a 2.57″ display, 8 GB of internal storage, a 5 megapixel camera, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and HP Touchstone support. Nothing on price yet, but it will arrive this spring. This is obviously aimed at the female of the species.

The Pre 2 is available for pre-order tomorrow, so we aren’t sure why HP has announced this one now. It kind of kills sales of the Pre 2. Sucks for that model. The Pre 3 is HP’s new webOS phone, packing decent specs. The Pre 3 will sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8x55 processor clocked to 1.4GHz, a 3.58″ touchscreen (480 x 800), 8 or 16 GB of internal storage, and Flash support.

It also features a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5 megapixel rear camera with flash, 720p HD video recording, a VGA front facing camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and HP Touchstone support. Yeah, screw the Pre 2. You’ll want to wait for this one.

At HP’s webOS event today, the first webOS tablet called TouchPad was introduced. The TouchPad features a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core 1.2GHz processor, a 9.7″ touchscreen (1024 x 768), 16 or 32GB of storage, Flash support, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, internal stereo speakers, Beats Audio, a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera, and HP Touchstone support.

That is one nice feature set. The iPad 2, PlayBook and Xoom just got some serious competition. Nothing on price yet, but it will be available this summer.

A tipster sent some internal renders of HP / Palm’s “Topaz” webOS tablet to the folks over at Engadget, which is one of two tablets currently developed by HP/Palm. The two tablets are the 9-inch Topaz and a 7-inch model codnamed Opal. As you can see in the render, it sports the no-button design, a front-facing camera, a micro USB port on the bottom, and what looks like a three speaker arrangement.

Word is that units will start to arrive at Palm HQ in June, with a launch later this year. The WiFi-only, AT&T 3G, and Verizon LTE versions of the Opal should arrive in September 2011, and on AT&T LTE in July 2012. No info on pricing yet.

Many of you have been waiting to get your hands on the new Palm Pre 2 smartphone from HP Palm and for you folks, we have some great news. HP has just started selling a SIM free version of the Palm Pre 2 in the US.

The Palm Pre 2 is available from the HP website for $449.99 SIM free. It’s the first smartphone from HP Palm since they took over Palm and it’s also the first to feature the new webOS 2.0. The Palm Pre 2 features a 3.1 inch HVGA multitouch display with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels, along with a slide out QWERTY keyboard
and a five megapixel camera with an LED flash.

Good news for those who had hoped that HP wouldn’t use Windows 7 in their HP Slate. Instead they will be using their newly acquired Palm WebOS. That’s what Monty Wong, vice-president of personal computing systems at HP Taiwan, said to Digitimes.

The HP Taiwan official said that HP will use WebOS for both smartphones and tablets, but not for notebooks. Also, the HP Slate will hit the market before October, with a “wide range” of software support at launch. What do you think? Good news? Or did you want another OS?

The first time I saw those HP web connected printers I wondered what the point was. I just don’t see anyone wanting to look up recipes or print movie tickets from the tiny screen on their printer when they can use the PC nearby more easily.

HP is now saying that it plans on bringing WebOS to its line of web connected printers. I still don’t see the point. I guess at least HP can point to the loot it spent on Palm and say see, we are using WebOS.

Palm just debuted its long awaited new handset, the Palm Pre. What a name. The touchscreen handset has a 3.1-inch 320 x 480 multitouch display, with a silver center button below and touch sensitivity all along the face. The lower part is for “gestures.” What’s that sliding out? A full QWERTY keyboard in portrait orientation. If you like, you can flip the phone on its side for accelerometer-sensed widescreen.

It’s running Palm’s all-new webOS platform, with TI’s new OMAP CPU. According to Palm, it provides laptop-style power, and powers the phone’s smooth transitions, scrolling and the like. Some other specs include EV-DO Rev. A, 802.11b/g WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP and 8GB of built-in flash storage. It also sports a 3 megapixel camera with LED flash, mass storage-friendly microUSB plug and a good ol’ 3.5mm headphone jack.