Hewlett-Packard broadened its push into the lucrative cell phone market and the array of equipment it can sell to large companies by unveiling two new cell phones Wednesday.
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.
Palo Alto-based HP unveiled the phones at a major launch in New York. Both run on the latest in third-generation, 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 personal digital assistance (PDA) devices. HP, which passed Dell Inc. last year as the No. 1 seller of PCs worldwide, is widely known for its PCs and extremely profitable printer ink.
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.
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.
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.
Source:Xinhua/agencies
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