HP to give smartphone market another shot

HP CEO Meg Whitman revealed in an interview that her company is working on a new attack on the smartphone market. In 2010 the company bought Palm for $1.2 billion in an attempt to gain a foothold in the smartphone market, but this plan failed miserably and in August 2011, HP announced it would cease production of all webOS-based devices, including tablets and smartphones. Another year later the remaining components of Palm were transferred to Gram, a new wholly owned HP subsidiary that focuses on software, user experience, thd cloud, engineering and partnering.

So why is HP preparing a new smartphone after the previous utter defeat? It seems because Whitman sees the smartphone as the first computing device in the post-PC era:

“My view is that 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…they will do everything on a smartphone…We’re a computing company; we have to take advantage of that form factor.”

Whitman explains the company took a detour with the smartphone (referring to Palm), and promises to get it right this time.