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Like the previous Palm Pre and Pixi, the HP Veer does a good job of aggregating contacts. Once you add your username and password for Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn and other services, the contacts are stored in one listing. That's amazingly helpful when it comes to searching.
Type in 'Bob' and you'll see all contacts with that name on every service you use. For browsing through contacts, there's no way to filter services (say, see only your Gmail contacts) so the mega-listing is not as helpful.
Contacts appear at every turn: when you create a new message, run the Facebook app (which you have to download – it's not included on the phone), or perform a search.
The phone dialer also shows contacts for multiple services, although we found that feature less useful because so few of our social networking contacts have phone numbers listed. There's also a Contacts app.
Adding contacts is incredibly easy. You start the Contacts app and select a small Add button. You can tap in all the relevant details, select a custom ringtone for that contact, and enter other details.
The biggest problem with all of this easy contact management is that it's easy to get overloaded. If you have thousands of contacts, you'll need to adjust your thinking about how to find them – it's always easier to search than to browse contacts, which means you have to know what you're looking for.
Calls on the HP Veer were quite good. We were impressed with the speakerphone – we could both hear the caller easily and, after several test calls, the person on the other end said we were loud and clear.
This is another testament to Palm and HP's way of packing a powerful voice-calling phone into such a small size. We never had any dropped calls or calling issues.
Because the phone is so small, you might have trouble actually dialling numbers. (The contacts integration is so good that you'll find it's easier to search for contacts and set speed dials.) The touchscreen dial pad works fine, but the digits are so small that you'll need to press slowly and surely.
Call quality sounded better than some other recent phones we've tested, including the iPhone 4. The HP Veer fits comfortably next to your ear, even if you might feel like a pre-teen using such a small and dainty phone. For those who prefer small phones, the calling features are quite robust.
