Mikey Campbell
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman on Friday revealed that the company is working on a new smartphone, and plans to market the unit heavily in foreign countries where handsets may be a consumer's sole computing device.
In an early morning interview on the Fox Business Network (via Mercury News), Whitman outlined the company's future plans to become relevant in the smartphone arena, a market in which HP has not been successful.
In answering a question regarding whether HP intends to build a smartphone using the assets acquired from its purchase of Palm in 2010, Whitman said, "We are working on this." She went on to say that the company "did take a detour into smartphone, and we've gotta get it right this time."
Whitman appears to be taking the company's reentry into the saturated smartphone market seriously, and said her mantra to the team working on the project is: "Better right than faster than we should be there."
"We have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that is your first computing device," Whitman said. "There will be countries around the world where people may never own a tablet, or a PC, or a desktop; they will do everything on the smartphone. We're a computing company, we have to take advantage of that form factor."
The CEO made note of HP's wide-spanning business model, saying that she wants the company to offer the best products from enterprise to tablets and convertibles, "all the way to smartphones." As a short aside, Whitman pointed out that HP recently took over the top spot in workstation sales from Apple.
HP abandoned smartphone development in 2011 after failing to gain traction with devices based on Palm's webOS platform, which the company ultimately made open source.
Whitman gave no hints as to what operating system the upcoming smartphone would use, or when the device would be ready for market.
Christine McKee
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65 Comments
Way to get on the bandwagon...
Yeah, HP? Hi. You know that WebOS thing you had that you destroyed? Use that. Only do it right this time.
The last thing Apple needs is another company to sue for IP infringement.
Develop, market then sell them off and close down the department. HP is good at two things. Making printers and PC's. Maybe they should stick to that and leave the real talent of making portable tablets and phones to the people who are capable of doing such things.
So HP got rid of Palm's WebOS smartphone Pre. Since HP wants to develop a Post PC phone, I guess they will call it the "Post". So they've gone from Pre to Post! Or do you have a suggestion for the HP phone name?
Good move on HP's part. This is the correct step - because this is where things are going to go. Use your cell phone as your computer - use some protocol to drive a monitor, keyboard/mouse; LTE to get to the net, and then some sort of cloud based storage.