HP confirms it's back in the smartphone business A senior HP executive has confirmed that the company will make yet another foray into the smartphone sector, three years after wasting $1.3bn buying webOS and then shutting it down shortly afterwards. "The answer is yes but I cannot give a timetable," Yam Su Yin, HP senior director of consumer PC and media tablets for Asia …
I know it's kind of unfashionable, but I have a soft spot for HP. Well, it's heritage at least. I've always thought it had to reverse this opt out of the phone market. It would never get back to its innovative roots if it didn't. And I'd like to see it figure out how to do good things again.
"Windows Phone 8 might offer some tie-ins with HP's desktop portfolio, but if you're looking to make a splash in the smartphone arena it's better to use an OS people actually want to buy."
Android market is saturated though. Windows phone is growing market share rapidly and already left Blackberry in the dust. If HP can produce a decent device then there is likely a bigger future in Windows phone....
>> Windows phone is growing market share rapidly
There seems to be some debate about that. Some stats-gatherers seem to think it's actually shrinking in some markets (notably the US, Germany and Australia), and that no, it's not bigger than blackberry in all markets (US again).
People mostly don't want Windows phone. MS is just not cool.
"There seems to be some debate about that. "
There really isn't.. Windows Phone grew market share by over 100% in the last year, and Nokia are continuing to expand the product ranges and move into more markets that is underpinning the growth of WP.
"Some stats-gatherers seem to think it's actually shrinking in some markets (notably the US, Germany and Australia), and that no, it's not bigger than blackberry in all markets (US again)."
Some people seem to be confusing installed base (which has a large number of slowly dying legacy Windows Mobile devices) with sales.
Windows Phone has grown year on year in every major market. Windows phone is outselling Blackberry globally - as of April by 8 times! in the US and by about 100% in the UK....
The latest Gartner figures I can find are from 1Q13 and show ~50% year on year growth.
Which might be really impressive if the market share (yes, of sales) wasn't still under 3% of the market and still under Blackberry. (reference http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2482816)
This is still a TINY proportion of sales, let alone install base. And compared to the historic market share that older Win based smartphones had, in business and with the public, this is a MASSIVE decline.
Unless they work for Agilent, who still have most of the market that HP once had and still make some of the very best test equipment available.
Mind you, as someone that used to work for Marconi Instruments said to me once, it's a shame that they chose a name which is an anagram of genital.
This stuff is getting a bit old; even the design fuddy-duddies are getting used to slick UIs with nice typography and negative space. Last year everyone was mocking Metro's flatness; now it's all over (and much worse in) the iOS 7 beta. Journos really don't seem to have much of an opinion of their own sometimes.
Lots of people like Windows Phone. There are reasons to not buy it, but most people don't know them.
Interesting to know how many of the "informed" comments, by Anonymous Cowards and others, are made after actually using a Windows Phone device properly. I get the feeling that many are just regurgitating other viewpoints, or looking at reviews, before "advising" others in an attempt to present an image of "look how great I am".
Yes, from a technical viewpoint there is much that can be done on Android that isn't as easy on other operating systems. However from a slickness and usability viewpoint, I find my family members and friends love the OS compared to IOS and Android. I own 2 x Android devices, 1 x iPhone, 1 x Windows Phone 7.5, and 1 x Windows Phone 8, so at least I have tried each of those for myself.
Each to their own of course, however unless you have actually used a Windows Phone 8, any comment made is pretty worthless.
(And yes, I fully expect this post to be down-voted by the Android and Apple fanatics/trolls. For info, my main phone is Android, so I am not anti-Android in any way. I just believe that for many less technical people, the Windows Phone offers a lot, and has it's place.)
I've never met anyone who actually _owns_ a windows phone that doesn't like it. I still fully intend to buy one to replace my current android set when it finally dies on me - not that I don't like my android phone, or any of the others out there that I could buy instead, but having used WinPho, I like it better.
Is it perfect? No. Nothing is, but I have no idea why people don't buy them. Some of them are even amazingly cheap. I guess the microsoft brand is just so tarnished people won't go near it even when they have a compelling product to offer.
>> I've never met anyone who actually _owns_ a windows phone that doesn't like it.
The only person I've ever met who owns (owned?) a windows phone hated it. Granted this was back in the 7 days when there were no custom ringtones allowed, amongst hundreds of other usability issues.
I've rarely seen one since.
True, but if you put it like this, a lot of "popular" things become unpopular. For everyone one person wanting an iphone, there are 6 who don't - and that number was a lot higher in the past. When the iphone sold a million in 76 days, that was actually 7 billion people who didn't want one.
But instead the iphone gets nothing but hype from the media (including in this article, ranking Apple alongside Samsung - actually it's Nokia who are 2nd place; they make a lot more phones than just WP ones).
Who cares anyway? I like Linux, but people here don't go around saying "For every one person who wants Linux, 99 people don't", and then urge every manufacturer to only offer Windows.
"For every one person that wants a Windows Phone, there are twenty that don't. I would hardly call that "lot's of people like Windows Phone.""
As of Kantar figures in April 2013, WP already had a 8.4% share of the UK market....From basically nowhere a couple of years ago, that's a lot of people now liking Windows phone....
But..unfortunately they talk about a "differentiated" experience. Given that the device will be assembled from the OEM parts bin with at most a token bit of customisation, this could only mean they intend to "add value" with some HP specific overlay on the Android software.
Most operator and phone maker customisation of Android isn't well received; HP have a poor record in software, so you have to wonder what they will bring that differentiaties it, and how well that will be received. At a guess, lots of HP branding, pointless changes to make it look less like Android, creating an overhead that makes updates slow (and expensive for HP), ultimately leading to orphan devices. But those are issues for personal buyers. In the business sector, most users have no say and no choice, and the main smartphone makers have offered some very poorly focused handsets at business, either too cr@p, or too expensive, and invariably carrying features (like cameras) that aren't needed for most business users.
Targeted at corporates, HP can try and push it through the enterprise services channel, and further marginalise the telecoms operators, maybe it will be a success if they make sure that the TCO is in favour of HP branded phones, by raising the support costs for non-HP devices? I wouldn't buy one, because I don't like or trust the company that HP now is. But as a business user, I could well be told that HP are the new corporate standard.
"What few percent of market share WP has earned has mostly came from the brand of the phone (Nokia, HTC) or the hardware and not because its a windows phone."
You could say the same for Android / Samsung. What matters is the Windows Phone is still growing market share quite quickly and will likely hit double digits in a number of major markets this year.
The launch this month of the EOS 41 Megapixel Lumia and the Windows Phone App Store becoming more mature with fewer 'missing' popular apps will likely keep that momentum going.
And of course the apparent failure of Blackberry.
Looks like the "Glisten" was their last phone, with Windows mobile 6.5
http://www.gsmarena.com/hp_ipaq_glisten-3036.php
Obviously HP really has no chance in the mobile space(maybe they can maintain a 10th of 1% of market share or something) unless they're going to invest many billions in product. Anyone heard much of HP's recent foray into Android tablets(short of the initial announcement many months ago)? Yeah, didn't think so.
I was one hoping/expecting they were going to invest said billions into WebOS. But short timer syndrome kicked in yet again...
I agree that Android is the most likely choice.
However -
The HP phone will definitely run Android. Anything else would be suicidal. Windows phone marketshare is in freefall
No it isn't, Barry. You want it to be but it's growing like a fungus on the corpse of Blackberry. The latest Kantar results show a continual market share rise at Blackberry's expense.
No dogged, the wp8 market can be described like this: consumers buying wp7.5 Nokias, brand to which they are used to use and trust, because of the price and not the OS, and (and here it's the BB bit) the poor souls of the sales department who have to swallow whatever the Vodafones of this world decides because of the contract signed by the companies. Which means, consumers buying the crap and dead-end WP7.5 and the expensive models included in contracts, not people rushing to buy the high-end gear, which are a minority.
Windows Phone marketshare now down to 3% (May 2013)
http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/comscore-androids-us-subscriber-growth-rebounds-ios-plateaus/2013-07-01
"Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone also declined in May, sliding from 3.2 percent U.S. market share in February to 3 percent."
I wasn't aware that the US was the entire world.
(And the US market has always been very different from the rest of the world; one where Nokia has always had little presence, and Apple has done its best, with Android not dominating as much compared with the rest of the world - interesting to see then Android having a rebound in the US.)
So Microsoft can cherrypick their best regions? As American is the only market that gets Xbox360 numbers reported and shouted about by Microsoft. When it comes to Windows Phone, they are "unique and don't matter"..
Funny that...
The reality is, Windows Phone is dead whatever country you are in. When was the last time you saw anyone with one....
Yesterday in the bus! The first one I have seen "in the wild" here in Copenhagen. I had to look twice to make sure it wasn't an N9 though.
In my train compartment tonight, exactly 7 of the 8 people who I could see reading their phones were using iPhone 4s & 5s (hard to tell exactly at a distance). I saw no other brands.
The last 2 years have seen the iPhone pretty much dominate the market here, and despite wall to wall carpet bombing advertising for Lumias, they are pretty rare.
I conclude via my random observations in public transport every day, that in wealthy societies such as this one, where even the unemployed can afford a new iPhone, people like the iPhone more than other phones.
I choose Paris
The iPaq phone was way ahead of it's time. Features we take for granted today were available on it 8 years ago and there are things from it we STILL don't have, like a user facing camera built right INTO the screen, fully integrated and invisible. Or virtual games using the outside camera to project game props or even historical narratives as an overlay of the live image.
It took me years to understand why it failed.
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