We’re still gushing vast torrents of love for the fantastic, silky smooth webOS mobile operating system, but we’ve remained disappointed with the glacial growth of the accompanying app store for the HP Pre.
Hoping to spur both consumers and developers onto greater things is the the new HP Pre 3 which has just emerged on the Amazon Germany site with a retail price of €449 (£395).
The webOS 2.2 QWERTY slider packs a 3.6-inch WVGA (800 x 480) resolution screen, backed by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8x55 processor and 512MB of onboard RAM plus 8GB or 16GB of internal storage.
The phone comes with a pair of cameras – a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash supporting HD (up to 720p) video recording at the rear and a front-facing VGA number for video chats – as well as a built in accelerometer, GPS, compass and ambient light and proximity sensors.
Measuring up at 64mm (2.52 inches) wide, 111mm (4.37 inches) high and 16mm (0.63 inches) thick, the Pre 3 weighs in at a modest 156 grams (5.5 ounces) and comes with support for HP’s rather natty Touchstone charging technology.
We’ve always warmed to Palm/HP’s innovation, but – at the risk of repeating ourselves – unless they sort out a decent app store, the company are always going to find it hard to grab consumers’ attention, no matter how lovely their phones are.
