Hewlett Packard is rumored to be planning a return to the smartphone business in
the coming days with a pair of low-priced devices aimed at China and other Asian
markets.
The two rumored phablet-sized smartphones would be priced between $200 and $
250 as off-contract, unlocked devices and could appear before the end of 2013,
according to The Information .
The tech site reported this week that HP CEO Meg Whitman is "taking another stab at
the crowded mobile-phone industry as she tries to turn around the company." The
rumored "affordable" smartphones for markets like China, India, and the Philippines
are purportedly a 6-inch device and a 7-inch handset that would push the envelope
on the line between phablets and full-blown tablets.
Details on these devices are pretty spare, but the assumption is that they would run
Google's Android operating system and sport an ARM-based application processor.
HP already has the Android-based Slate 7 $149.99 at eBay tablet powered by a
dual-core 1.6GHz Rockchip Cortex-A9 chip in its portfolio.
It could get interesting if the company goes in a different direction—HP plays in the
mobile device market with products like its Envy X2 $604.99 at Amazon , which runs
Microsoft's Windows 8 and has an Intel Atom chip under the hood. It seems unlikely
that the company would test the waters with its first stab at a smartphone in several
years with devices running Windows Phone 8 and/or featuring Intel inside, but you
never know.
HP abandoned its last, nascent effort to develop smartphones using the webOS
mobile operating system a couple of years ago. In 2011, the computing giant killed
its consumer tablet, the Touchpad, and ended support for webOS devices, effectively
taking a mulligan on its 2010 acquisition of webOS developer and handset maker
Palm.
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