HP not interested in Windows Phone, sees less than explosive growth for the OS

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At one point HP was set to be a Windows Phone OEM, and while the company is HP CEO Meg Whitman has said HP will "inevitably" get back into smartphones, it seems clear these will eventually turn out to be Android handsets.

"Smartphone is part of a broad way that we interact with computing so in that sense its important HP be part of that," said Dan Tindall, HP’s printer and PC Vice President for worldwide channel development and SMB. He however continued by saying he believed the short-term opportunity for Windows Phone 8 is "smaller than explosive in the first few quarters".

Whatever phone HP releases in the end will not be coming soon.

"It’s a huge market, we recognise its size and it’s something we are studying. There is nothing to [yet] announce from HP for fiscal 2013."

In contrast HP rival Lenovo is much more open with their plans, which includes Windows Phone.

Neil Berville, Lenovo exec director for EMEA channel, said the future of PCs will be on four platforms: phones, traditional form factors, tablets and TVs.

"We will have Windows phones [in Europe], we’ll launch with Intel, so it’s part of our longer term strategy," he said.

Lenovo has grown to be number one in the smartphone space in China and is pushing out the products in India, the Philippines and Russia.

Berville said the rate of adoption of Windows Phones had been slow to date, "so it’s quite a challenge for Microsoft".

This may however be boosted by Windows 8 sales, which will get the tiled interface in front of hundreds of millions of users. Canalys analyst Tim Coulling said he expected an ad campaign to detail how the phone and PC operating systems will work together.

In terms of addressing the business market Windows Phone 8 handsets certainly have a lot more to recommend them than Android devices, especially in terms of security and integration with the Microsoft business stack, with Samsung in particular seeing it as a great opportunity to enter the business market with a range of Windows 8 phones and PCs.

Samsung UK vice president of IT, Graham Long said "In discussions we’ve had with IT directors and chief information officers we’ve been able to tell them we’ll be able to provide a smartphone, a tablet, a PC and an all-in-one utilising the IT they’ve built their business on for the last 25 years."

Of course HP may be better of delivering nothing at all rather than the half-arsed Windows Mobile products they produced in their latter years. Do our readers agree? Let us know below.

Via The Register and Pocketinfo.nl

More about the topics: business, HP, windows phone 8

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