In a move that didn't exactly sit well with fans of webOS, HP last year announced that it would "discontinue operations" on webOS hardware. Since then, HP has been working to open source webOS, but we haven't exactly heard much other smartphone news from the company. That changes today, as HP CEO Meg Whitman has told Fox Business News that HP must "ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that is your first computing device." Whitman didn't offer up any details about when we might see a new smartphone from HP, but she later reiterated HP's need for a new entry in the smartphone market, saying that HP "is a computing company" and so it must "take advantage of that form factor."
Obviously there's still a lot we don't know about HP's smartphone plans, but it's definitely interesting to learn that the company is planning to reenter the smartphone market. This news comes less than a month after a leaked HP memo revealed that the company's got a new consumer tablet-focus Mobility Global Business Unit cooking, so it sounds like HP may be preparing to make a big move back into consumer mobile space. Now we just have to wait to see exactly what HP has got up its sleeve. How many of you are interested in seeing a new smartphone from HP?
