Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard admitted the company is “working on” a new smartphone product with which to succeed in the market. The firm famously acquired Palm with the very same intentions only to be “met with utter defeat,” according to financial magazine Forbes. Incidentally an HP smartphone has recently appeared in benchmark results, codenamed “Bender”, the phone runs Android ICS and is powered by a Qualcomm S4 dual core processor.
It wouldn't be the company's first foray into the mobile market. In 2010, HP purchased smartphone maker Palm for US$1.2 billion and developed webOS, its own mobile operating system. Its TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphone failed to dazzle in the competitive market.
Whitman's predecessor, Leo Apotheker, decided to kill the OS and its corresponding products after about 16 months on the market. Apotheker wanted HP to focus more on cloud services and software than mobile devices, and was ousted after less than a year on the job. That effectively ended the use of their WebOS platform. The WebOS platform has since gone open source.
By buying Palm, HP was attempting to buy its way into the market with an established but affordable and credible player. However, much to the distress of WebOS fans the firm didn’t really put enough effort into its smartphones. The company strategy wasn’t helped by getting through a string of CEOs in quick succession, one of which decided, the day after the launch of the Palm Pre 3 to abandon the company’s WebOS product line.
A Fox Business News reporter in an interview with Meg Whitman asked “Where is the HP smartphone? Have you guys got something up your sleeve?” to which Ms Whitman replied “We did take a detour with the smartphone (Palm) and we have to get it right this time.” She said she wants HP to be able to offer IT solutions all the way from workstations, to desktops, to laptops, to tablets and convertibles, and also to smartphones.
Appearing in GLBenchmark test results online is an HP branded smartphone codenamed “bender”. The phone runs Android ICS 4.0.4 and is powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm S4 dual core processor. The screen size is a very wide 1366x720, does it bend or fold in two? Is it bent like a banana? Who knows...
A report in the WSJ also quoted Ms Whitman as likening a company-issued HP laptop to a brick. The financial orientated website says that she intends to fight to keep HP above Lenovo as the world’s biggest PC maker by volume. Sadly HP seems to have been left behind, she says by innovation and “something that is more beautiful”. Putting money-in-mouth-position, the company has doubled the in-house design team to 60 people.
Analysts speaking to the WSJ agree that better presented, more expensive products are better suited to HP than a bunch of cheap generic looking PCs. One of the first products to emerge from the new design regime is the HP Envy X2. But in the view of a market analyst, "I can't really see an 'HP angle' in this - after all Samsung have got the design angle sewn up. Only real USP I can see for Bender is if it's OS is somehow extended to fit more easily into a corporate environment - so it prints to wireless printers (HP ones of course), has one-step integration into Exchange, etc, etc. Smartphones are a bad idea, tablet on the other hand, not so much... ".
It wouldn't be the company's first foray into the mobile market. In 2010, HP purchased smartphone maker Palm for US$1.2 billion and developed webOS, its own mobile operating system. Its TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphone failed to dazzle in the competitive market.
Whitman's predecessor, Leo Apotheker, decided to kill the OS and its corresponding products after about 16 months on the market. Apotheker wanted HP to focus more on cloud services and software than mobile devices, and was ousted after less than a year on the job. That effectively ended the use of their WebOS platform. The WebOS platform has since gone open source.
By buying Palm, HP was attempting to buy its way into the market with an established but affordable and credible player. However, much to the distress of WebOS fans the firm didn’t really put enough effort into its smartphones. The company strategy wasn’t helped by getting through a string of CEOs in quick succession, one of which decided, the day after the launch of the Palm Pre 3 to abandon the company’s WebOS product line.
A Fox Business News reporter in an interview with Meg Whitman asked “Where is the HP smartphone? Have you guys got something up your sleeve?” to which Ms Whitman replied “We did take a detour with the smartphone (Palm) and we have to get it right this time.” She said she wants HP to be able to offer IT solutions all the way from workstations, to desktops, to laptops, to tablets and convertibles, and also to smartphones.
Appearing in GLBenchmark test results online is an HP branded smartphone codenamed “bender”. The phone runs Android ICS 4.0.4 and is powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm S4 dual core processor. The screen size is a very wide 1366x720, does it bend or fold in two? Is it bent like a banana? Who knows...
A report in the WSJ also quoted Ms Whitman as likening a company-issued HP laptop to a brick. The financial orientated website says that she intends to fight to keep HP above Lenovo as the world’s biggest PC maker by volume. Sadly HP seems to have been left behind, she says by innovation and “something that is more beautiful”. Putting money-in-mouth-position, the company has doubled the in-house design team to 60 people.
Analysts speaking to the WSJ agree that better presented, more expensive products are better suited to HP than a bunch of cheap generic looking PCs. One of the first products to emerge from the new design regime is the HP Envy X2. But in the view of a market analyst, "I can't really see an 'HP angle' in this - after all Samsung have got the design angle sewn up. Only real USP I can see for Bender is if it's OS is somehow extended to fit more easily into a corporate environment - so it prints to wireless printers (HP ones of course), has one-step integration into Exchange, etc, etc. Smartphones are a bad idea, tablet on the other hand, not so much... ".
No comments:
Post a Comment