In one of the more mysterious statements of the day, HP chief Mark Hurd claims that his company didn’t buy Palm and its webOS operating system to enter the smartphone business, but rather to drive “small form factor web-connected devices.” You know. Tablets and MIDs.
Hurd claimed that HP had no interest in spending “billions of dolllars” trying to get into the smartphone business. “That doesn’t in any way make any sense.”
Uh, really? As Apple has amply proven with the iPhone and iPad, the future of computing is mobile. Whoever controls most of the operating system space in the mobile arena is going to profit big time: this is exactly the reason why Google is licensing their Android operating system for free.
But in actuality, the reason mobile computing is the future isn’t because you can make telephone calls or text messages on mobile devices: that’s just the reason that gets them initially into people’s pockets. It’s mobile internet that’s the future, and someday, our smartphones are probably going to be just tiny, 3G-capable tablets with VoIP capabilities that we keep in our pockets.
While Apple and Google battle it out in the smartphone arena, perhaps HP is playing it smart after all, and trying to position itself to be ready to pounce in the post-smartphone future which iPhone and Android create.
