The new HP Pre3 smartphone has been quietly launched in Europe and is available SIM-free online for stg£299. A US launch is imminent. The device, a successor to the Palm Pre, comes on the heels of the HP TouchPad, which also runs on WebOS.
It is not yet clear if any operators in Europe have been signed up to sell the smartphone.
The new smartphone comes with a large WVGA display, a vertical, slide-out keyboard and a 1.4GHz processor.
HP claims there are thousands of apps available for HP webOS, including those for productivity, social networking, and health and fitness.
The smartphone comes with the next generation of Touchstone technology, which enables better sharing between the Pre3 and the TouchPad by simply tapping them together.
The camera on the device is 5-mexapixels and the display is 3.5-inches in size.
It includes 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage.
Charged by a microUSB connector, the device is available in black and weighs 156 grams.
With the Pre3, HP better hope for better success than its TouchPad is having. According to reports, the majority of Best Buy’s supply of TouchPads are gathering dust on shelves and stockrooms.
According to All Things Digital, Best Buy took on an inventory of 270,000 TouchPads, but it has only sold 25,000 tablets so far.
It has also been reported that HP plans to bring its WebOS mobile operating systems to cars and various appliances.
