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Shooting video with the HP Veer is almost as painful as shooting a still image. The small and light phone is hard to grip firmly for video, so most movies turned out a bit blurry and shaky. There are no settings available for zooming in on a subject, and no effects to tweak your scene.
Video quality isn't that impressive. The Veer is supposed to shoot in 720p HD but in our tests the video looked grainy. There may be enough pixels to qualify as HD but the colour quality looked more like VGA resolution.
There is no video light, so the best videos were those we shot outside on a bright sunny day.
Our indoor video of someone playing a piano looked dull and colourless, and the sound quality was also poor. In the video of a choir concert, the colour looked overly saturated as though someone was holding a light bulb right next to the phone.
Another video outside looked reasonably bright and clear. However, we shot the same scene with a Canon 1D digital camera and there's no comparison – the video on the HP Veer is just not at a quality level to make this smartphone one you would want to use consistently.
We also had a fairly major bug: for some videos, the HP Veer would freeze up and reboot. In one case, we thought we'd shot a video at a paintball tournament, only to discover later that the video file was corrupted.
The Veer provides a simplistic editing mode where you can trim a video.
Once you do shoot a video, it is reasonably easy to email the final result as an attachment. In fact, this is the one area where we had no problems: uploading videos. The Veer connected quickly and reliably to a computer for copying media files to and from the device.
The camera and video recording on the Veer is lacklustre, and even at the lower price we were expecting something a little better - even the INQ Cloud Touch outperforms it. Photos looked blurry and there are no settings or effects at all.
If you're looking for a phone with any kind of camera ability, we suggest you look elsewhere.
