HP’s CEO Meg Whitman recently spoke to Fox Business about plans to re-enter the smart phone market and then, in little or no time, we see an HP smartphone in a GL Benchmark list of test results. Ms. Whiteman spoke up recently on how HP would soon have a new smartphone to its name. She assured everyone that HP is in no hurry and they’re focusing on coming up with a good solid device. It would seem that HP would try its best not to make the same “mistakes” that they made in the past when the device hit the market.
The mysterious new phone is codenamed Bender and will run on Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich. Under the hood we also have a Qualcomm S4 Dual Core Snapdragon processor, with 1.5 Ghz on each core, with a minimum CPU frequency of 384 Mhz and a maximum frequency of 1512 Mhz. Screen quality seems promising with a good resolution of 1366 X 720.
We cannot by any means draw any reasonable conclusion from this because HP could just be testing the platform for some other applications. However it can also mean that HP intends to join the Android platform and use it to further the development of webOS after it was abandoned. Weighing both the possibilities, the latter seems more likely, as webOS is now open source and has spun off as a separate company called gram.
Though HP has never had success any time recently with any of its smartphones, they did make some pretty capable devices during their time, notably the IPAQ 600 and the IPAQ Glisten. HP did make an attempt to leverage a wonderful webOS platform, with promising scope, but their attempts were cut short before it even made any sort of launch. Some webOS purists would be disappointed to hear that the breakup between webOS and HP may be forever.
As to whether HP would meet any sort of commercial success in an already overcrowded smart phone market is a matter we’ll have to wait to watch. With the Samsung Galaxy S III, the HTC One X and Motorola DROID RAZR series making waves in the Android market, it seems like HP’s work is just beginning.
