HP wants to make smartphones again. The Palm Pixi, left, and Pre are two smartphones produced before HP purchased and later gave up on Palm. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired
Hewlett-Packard’s on again, off again relationship with smartphones is about to be back on … again.
On Thursday, HP CEO Meg Whitman told Fox Business in a TV interview that the company known for its PCs and printers plans to get back into the phone business.
“We did take a detour into smartphones and we’ve got to get it right this time,” said Whitman, who is HP’s fourth chief executive in eight years. “And so, my mantra to the team is: ‘Better right than faster than we should be there.’ So we’re working to make sure that when we do this, it will be the right thing for Hewlett-Packard and we will be successful.”
Whitman’s comments must be bittersweet if not blood-boiling to former employees of Palm, the smartphone maker that HP bought in 2010 for $1.2 billion. In August of last year, after the TouchPad tablet was a clear sales flop and HP had dumped the Palm brand name, HP declared it was giving up on building smartphones and tablets running Palm’s WebOS operating system. Since July, HP has been releasing WebOS piece by piece as open source software dubbed Enyo.
But while Whitman is at the helm of HP, she wasn’t the one to pull the plug on Palm and WebOS phones and tablets. That move was made by her predecessor, Léo Apotheker. Whitman, who has been on the job at HP for about a year now, said a major reason she wants to steer the company back into phones is because phones are the prime growth area in the computing industry.
“My view is we have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that is your first computing device,” Whitman told Fox. “You know, 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’re a computing company. We have to take advantage of that form factor.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/09/meg-whitman-says-hp-needs-to-make-a-smartphone/
No comments:
Post a Comment