Whitman Confirms: HP Will Offer Another Smartphone… Someday
HP's attempts at competing in the mobile phone market haven't exactly gone well. Even so, the company isn't completely giving up on the mobile market. In a recent interview, HP CEO Meg Whitman said, "My view is we have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world, that is your first computing device. 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 a smartphone, we are a computing company we have to take advantage of that form-factor."
Although Whitman didn't supply a timeframe for when we could expect to see such a device, she recognizes that HP must get things right this time around. As a result, HP doesn't plan to rush things. To put any rumors aside, Whitman also said the company is not interested in buying or licensing the BlackBerry platform from Research in Motion. Instead, HP plans to go in a different direction.
As you'll recall, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010 with high hopes of using Palm to enter the smartphone market. After a number of failed products, HP killed the webOS platform in August 2011. In December 2011, HP contributed the webOS platform to the open source software community.
