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The HP Veer is a 4G phone in the US, but don't let that fool you. In reality, the phone only runs at about 1Mbps for downloads and just over 100Kbps for uploads.
Also, the phone doesn't have a dual-core processor, so networking on the device, for both 4G and Wi-Fi, tends to run slowly because the phone is just not that fast. We weren't that impressed with the overall networking speed, and that really doesn't bode well for the UK launch.
The Veer's browser is good but not great. It does support Adobe Flash 10.1, but that's a bit hit or miss as it can be rather laggy at times, depending on which site you visit. We found that sites such as espn.com and ign.com worked well for browsing and appeared relatively quickly.
However, the small screen makes it hard to read text, and when you zoom in, you see the words but not much else. A full flash site such as Presonus.com, which has a large Flash animation, pulled up quickly and looked properly formatted.
However, the HP Veer didn't work for Hulu.com or YouTube.com. When you find a YouTube video, and want to watch it, the Veer actually pulls up a separate interface to play the video. We also had some page display issues with other sites that use rich formatting.
Text reflow on some sites was also erratic. In some cases, the font on the screen looked too bold or didn't format properly. In other cases, the text looked crisp and easy to read, at least when zoomed in, which we can only put down to the processor not correctly dealing with the tasks - so there's a chance firmware updates could rectify this, but don't bank on it.
The card interface of webOS comes in handy yet again for browsing. The browser doesn't support tabs, and even if it did, they wouldn't work well on the small screen. Instead, you can open multiple sessions where each one is a separate card.
It's great to open a favourite site and just leave that card open on the Home screen and access the site any time you want.
It's also easy to bookmark sites, share the link with other users and add one site to the main App screen. You access these options using the menu in the upper left corner of the browser.
