HP introduces big-and-brawny iPaq 610 and iPaq 910 smart phones
In addition to several other mobile product announcements today, HP showed off two new smart phones, and they're not for the faint of heart. — First, there's the HP iPaq 610 Business Navigator, a quad-band mobile with support …
Context & Ripple Effects
The iPaq 610 Business Navigator and iPaq 910 land as the handset layer of a broader push: back in May 2007, HP staged a mobility showcase promising to connect people to information and entertainment wherever they are, and these two quad-band business devices are the first concrete phones to carry that banner. They also extend an old HP instinct — the company has long blurred the line between phone and PC, a theme a 2005 start-up's phone-PC hybrid handheld had already made explicit in this space.
Syndication was immediate but narrow — Unwired View ran the full new iPaq line-up (914, 614, 314, 214, 114) on or about launch day — suggesting enthusiast press attention rather than mainstream pickup for what remains a business-first product family.
First-order effects
- Business buyers get a Windows Mobile-class alternative from their incumbent PC vendor, letting HP pitch IT departments a single brand spanning desktops, notebooks like the Compaq 2710p tablet it shipped earlier in 2007, and now handsets.
Second-order effects
- Carriers and enterprise resellers gain another quad-band device to slot into corporate fleets, while rival handset makers face HP competing for the same enterprise procurement budgets that already buy its PCs.
Third-order effects
- If PC vendors keep extending into handsets, the smartphone market edges toward consolidation around full-line enterprise suppliers, with device convergence — one handheld doing PC work — becoming the default expectation rather than a niche experiment.
The trend: Enterprise computing vendors are folding smart phones into their existing PC portfolios, turning the handset into another line item on the corporate IT order.