Speculations that the computer goliath Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) will be manufacturing smartphones next year have been laid to rest by CEO Meg Whitman. She has said she is in no rush to enter in to a very highly saturated market that is largely dominated by Apple (News - Alert) iPhones and Samsung Galaxy models. With other new competitors entering the marketing, there is very little room for more smartphone makers.

Whitman is keeping mum as to any possible ideas that HP may have toward smartphones. In 2010, HP bought smartphone and PDA maker Palm. Upon buying Palm, HP ceased production of the hardware and focused their efforts of the software into a business unit named Gram. When HP is ready to enter the smartphone market, they are not saying which operating system they are planning on using; they could use an existing system or re-vamp their Palm’s old operating system, WebOS. HP will be running Windows 8- which is launching this week- on their upcoming tablets.


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When Whitman was asked about HP producing a smartphone in 2013, she said, “We've got to have the full range of devices, from workstations to desktops to laptops to hybrids. A phone will probably follow in 2014.  We need to do a small number of things really well as opposed to doing everything at once.”

HP is more focused on trying to make their recent purchases of Autonomy (News - Alert) and Vertica pay off. These two expensive purchases are HP’s latest attempt to enter in to the cloud computing market. They are also trying to recover from the recent problems they have had with Oracle (News - Alert) along with pushing businesses to purchase their new Windows 8 tablets.

When they do finally decide to enter the smartphone market, they, along with the new Nokia and Windows models have the potential to pose a serious threat to Apple and Samsung (News - Alert).