Hewlett Packard is rumored to be planning a return to the smartphone business in the coming days with a pair of low-priced devices aimed at China and other Asian markets.
The two rumored phablet-sized smartphones would be priced between $200 and $250 as off-contract, unlocked devices and could appear before the end of 2013, according to The Information.
The tech site reported this week that HP CEO Meg Whitman is "taking another stab at the crowded mobile-phone industry as she tries to turn around the company." The rumored "affordable" smartphones for markets like China, India, and the Philippines are purportedly a 6-inch device and a 7-inch handset that would push the envelope on the line between phablets and full-blown tablets.
Details on these devices are pretty spare, but the assumption is that they would run Google's Android operating system and sport an ARM-based application processor. HP already has the Android-based Slate 7 $139.99 at Sears tablet powered by a dual-core 1.6GHz Rockchip Cortex-A9 chip in its portfolio.
It could get interesting if the company goes in a different direction—HP plays in the mobile device market with products like its Envy X2 $611.99 at Amazon, which runs Microsoft's Windows 8 and has an Intel Atom chip under the hood. It seems unlikely that the company would test the waters with its first stab at a smartphone in several years with devices running Windows Phone 8 and/or featuring Intel inside, but you never know.
Source : PCMag
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