HP smartphone not coming in 2013, says CEO Meg Whitman
But HP will need one within five years to avoid missing out on a big segment of the market, its CEO said — HP has no plans to launch a smartphone next year but will need to sell one eventually to avoid missing out on …
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's mobile question has been open since it bought Palm's webOS and then floated licensing the operating system to other makers under the previous leadership. Meg Whitman, now a year into the CEO job, has kept the software alive by shipping an open-source webOS beta in August 2012 while rebuilding HP's hardware lineup around Windows 8 — the business-focused ElitePad 900 tablet due in January, touch-enabled all-in-ones like the Spectre One, and new Ultrabooks.
Her statement closes off the most-speculated next step for that stack: no HP phone in 2013, even though she argues the company must sell one within roughly five years or cede a major market segment. The breadth of pickup — Ars Technica, BGR, VentureBeat and five other outlets running the same report on the day — reflects how much attention still attaches to whether HP re-enters handsets at all.
First-order effects
- HP's 2013 mobility story rests entirely on Windows 8 hardware — the ElitePad 900 and its PC refreshes — leaving open-source webOS without a company-built flagship device to anchor it.
- Whitman's explicit five-year deadline turns the smartphone from a product decision into a stated strategic gap that HP's own leadership has put on the record.
Second-order effects
- Carriers and component partners planning 2013 lineups do so without an HP handset slot, while any future HP phone faces the OS-supply risk Whitman herself flagged when she warned the Google-Motorola deal could close-source Android.
- Rival PC makers weighing their own phone strategies get cover: if HP publicly defers entry, the pressure on Dell, Lenovo and Acer to justify handset bets eases for another cycle.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, HP's eventual entry would more plausibly ride someone else's OS than revive webOS as a consumer platform — making the open-source bet a hedge rather than a path back to handsets.
- The episode marks the point where traditional PC vendors stop treating smartphones as adjacent and start treating them as a segment they may have to buy their way into late, on worse terms.
The trend: PC makers are openly conceding they missed the smartphone build-out, with HP's five-year deadline framing late entry as inevitable but deferred.