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HP To Adopt Google's Android System

Reshaping the mobile landscape, Hewlett-Packard reportedly plans to adopt Google’s Android operating system to run a forthcoming line of mobile devices.

ReadWrite.com calls the would-be move “drastic,” and the result of HP “having failed to carve out a place for itself in the post-PC era.”

As such, “the world's biggest PC maker … is ready to abandon Microsoft's Windows for its mobile computing efforts,” Business Insider writes.

“If true, this would be a big shift in strategy for the once mighty PC maker,” Mashable writes.

Still, “getting back into the mobile device market isn't exactly a surprise for HP,” The Verge notes. “Last September, CEO Meg Whitman said that ‘we have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that would be your first computing device.’”

As for HP’s mobile prospects, Web watchers are less than optimistic.

“HP famously bought webOS and then brought a tablet to market based on that Palm-developed platform, the TouchPad, which ended up being a dismal failure,” TechCrunch recalls.

“When it comes to high-end Android tablets, we need a company that’s going to do something completely new and different,” writes VentureBeat. “That’s not exactly HP.”

“There is also some talk of HP going into smartphones, though that's a more tenuous proposition,” Gizmodo writes. “We've never seen HP design a great smartphone.”

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