There have been a lot of rumours in the PDA world recently about Hewlett Packard's potential return to the Clamshell market. If it were true, it would be a wonderful thing to happen to this community. Any device would inevitably be Windows Mobile based, something HPC:Factor has fought for for several years now.

There are clearly users in the community for whom Hewlett Packard crossed the line with the direction they took with the Jornada 700 series and the support services based around it.
It is never possible for us to gaze into a crystal ball and say for certain what will happen in the future. However of the large technology sites that picked up on the Hewlett Packard message originally posted on Computer Business Review, not one of them attempted to confirm the information.

We have excellent relations with Hewlett Packard here at HPC:Factor, and 22 hours after the article first made the rounds on various large news sites including others here in the community. Our phone call was the first the hp Europe knew of it.

All our internal sources will freely admit that they are not at liberty to discuss future releases, however no one else in hp seems to have heard about this. Unfortunately at this stage, our best uneducated guess, is that the announcement was a haphazard remark by a director on something discussed in a strategy meeting.
If anything though, it's promising that as a platform the Handheld PC is far from forgotten.

View: Hewlett Packard