HP Announces 2 new Smart Phones, no carriers announced though

[Fire14]

HP Deepens Push Into Cell Phone Market With 2 Business-Oriented Handsets

Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled two new cell phones Wednesday, pushing deeper into the lucrative mobile phone market and broadening the array of equipment it can sell to large companies.


The phones were launched during a celebrity-studded gala in New York highlighted by one of the Palo Alto company's most ambitious product rollouts, for the iPAQ brand of handheld devices.

Besides introducing several new HP laptop and desktop computers and a high-performance gaming PC, the launch included more than 55 products, including services, the two new phones and new personal digital assistants, or handheld computers.

All of the products are under the umbrella of HP's Personal Systems Group, the division that brought in $29.2 billion in sales last year and includes consumer and business PCs, plasma and LCD flat-screen televisions and PDAs.

HP is a heavy hitter in the PDA world, but the company is still best known for the PCs and printers that populate corporate offices and homes around the world. But as customers move away from PDAs and toward more phone-like devices, HP has responded by expanding into the cell phone and smart phone market in the past couple years.

The two phones announced Wednesday signal a new direction for HP as it builds off its strength in the PDA market and its ubiquity in corporate IT server rooms and employee offices and tries also to become a full-fledged smart phone maker.

The iPAQ 600 Series Business Navigator looks and functions like a cell phone and includes a navigation feature with 3-D maps. It's HP's second cell phone, coming on the heels of the Voice Messenger announced in February.

The company also announced the iPAQ 900 Series Business Messenger, a smart phone with a full keyboard that follows another full-keyboard model introduced last year.

Both run on the latest in third-generation, or 3G, high-speed networks. No carriers have been announced yet, but HP said the phones are planned to work with most major carriers.

The new phones are a key part of HP's efforts to expand its iPAQ brand of handheld products beyond PDA devices, which still sell briskly, though their popularity is fading in favor of more phone-like gadgets.

HP, which supplanted Dell Inc. last year as the No. 1 seller of PCs worldwide, is better known for its PCs and extremely profitable printer ink than its handheld devices.

Still, HP is a major player in the PDA world, ranking second behind market-leader Palm Inc. in worldwide PDA sales for the first half of 2007, according to market research firm IDC. More than 22 percent of the 1.6 billion PDAs sold in that period were HP products, according to IDC.

But the rise of smart phones has pressured PDA makers. The success of gadgets like Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and Palm's Treo _ and now Apple Inc.'s iPhone _ is prodding handheld device makers to beef up their offerings in an increasingly Internet-connected world.

PDAs are increasingly seen as companions to cell phones and smart phones instead of the all-in-one device they were once were, said Gene Wang, vice president of marketing for HP's handhelds unit.

"It's less that the PDA business is going away, and more that, especially with the new 3G networks coming out, you can put so many new features and services to work," Wang said. "It really brings the enterprise the productivity they're looking for."

When it comes to smart phones, HP is clearly still the newcomer. Less than one percent of the 53 million smart phones shipped during the first six months of the year were HP products, according to IDC.

Analysts said the company is facing an uphill battle as it fights entrenched competitors in the market of mobile devices sold to businesses.

But it also has deep pockets and tight relationships with customers who for years have relied on HP servers, PCs and services, analysts said.

"They're facing some stiff, stiff competition, and they're also walking a road where there's a lot of charred wreckage," said Crawford Del Prete, an IDC analyst. "But they're also HP and they have a lot of resources to do this."

HP Deepens Push into Cell Phone Market

[Jay2TheRescue]

I've been salivating about the thought of a 3G iPAQ since photos of the iPAQ 614c and 914c were leaked on Monday. I even thought of increasing my data plan so my monthly bill will be higher by upgrade time, (to qualify for a bigger discount) but I found out that the data plan I was on is no longer available. If I leave it now I won't be able to get it ever again. ($9.99 for 5mb of data)

Its still about 7 weeks before I qualify for an upgrade, so we'll see if Cingular gets it. I hope so.

-Jay

[Mobile Mike]

What's interesting to me is these are the first new IPAQs seen in several years. If HP has been making them all along, I sure haven't heard about them. I wonder what took them so long? Nonetheless, they are sweet looking smartphones.

[Jay2TheRescue]

Originally Posted by Mobile Mike

What's interesting to me is these are the first new IPAQs seen in several years. If HP has been making them all along, I sure haven't heard about them. I wonder what took them so long? Nonetheless, they are sweet looking smartphones.

I've got the iPAQ hw6515 (Windows Mobile 3), but they have an even newer model that runs Windows Mobile 5. I don't know when that one was released. I really would like a 3G iPAQ though. The iPAQ's are the only smartphones that I know of that have real GPS built into the phone, and does not rely on the network or a dongle to figure out where it is.

-Jay

[Mobile Mike]

Originally Posted by Jay2TheRescue

I've got the iPAQ hw6515 (Windows Mobile 3), but they have an even newer model that runs Windows Mobile 5. I don't know when that one was released. I really would like a 3G iPAQ though. The iPAQ's are the only smartphones that I know of that have real GPS built into the phone, and does not rely on the network or a dongle to figure out where it is.

-Jay

Jay, how long have you had your iPAQ? I remember Cingular carrying them about 3 years ago, but haven't seen anything since. Is it me or did HP go incognito for a while?

[Jay2TheRescue]

Originally Posted by Mobile Mike

Jay, how long have you had your iPAQ? I remember Cingular carrying them about 3 years ago, but haven't seen anything since. Is it me or did HP go incognito for a while?

I've had it a little over a year. I bought it used from our very own AzCellPhoneJunkie. I think the phone was about 6 months old at the time.

-Jay

[Mobile Mike]

Originally Posted by Jay2TheRescue

I've had it a little over a year. I bought it used from our very own AzCellPhoneJunkie. I think the phone was about 6 months old at the time.

-Jay

Wow, I guess they must have faded into the woodwork there for a while. I've been aware of them for many years, but hadn't noticed anything new from them until this announcement.