Maybe it's a bit of autumn nostalgia brought on by the falling leaves, or the fact that seemingly every other tech company in the world is putting out new mobile hardware right now, but HP reckons it wants to give the whole smartphone thing another go.
So says HP CEO Meg Whitman, who reckons the company should focus its efforts on producing a compelling entry-level device for emerging markets.
For most mobile technology fans, mentioning HP immediately brings on thoughts of the company's ill-fated efforts to muscle into the mobile game after buying out Palm and taking over control of webOS.
That misadventure took place before Whitman's time, though, and it's clear the new boss wants to be able to tell a different story once her own tenure comes to a close.
“In the end, I would love to be able to provide all the way from the most fabulous workstations … to desktops, to laptops, to our tablets and convertibles, all the way to the smartphone,” Whitman told Fox Business News.
“But we did take a detour into smartphone, and we’ve gotta get it right this time. 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 HP and we will be successful.”
She might need a bit of a shake-up to the wording of that mantra, but we think we get what she means. And it's probably as good a strategy as any right now considering how badly things went wrong last time.
HP certainly can't expect webOS' strength alone to carry it to mobile hardware success – it didn't work last time and the platform certainly hasn't improved its position relative to its rivals since the very public failure of the Pre3 and Veer smartphones and the TouchPad tablet last year.
Targeting emerging markets effectively gives HP the chance at a fresh start by aiming at markets where webOS has no real legacy to begin with, so the failure of HP's 2011 releases hasn't already poisoned the mobile waters.
“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 are a computing company [and] we have to take advantage of that form-factor,” Whitman added.
She almost makes it sound simple, doesn't she?
