HP’s smartphone market share: Nowhere to go but up

SAN DIEGO -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today may be an underdog in last place in the smartphone market, but according to HP head of mobile and former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein it has the sheer scale, the enterprise expertise and the developer-friendly mindset to make WebOS a top contender. And if all that isn’t enough, HP is open to the idea of licensing WebOS to a select few partners, Rubinstein said at Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) Uplinq conference today.

“Yes, today we’re the underdog, but I believe we understand the applications space,” Rubenstein said. HP also understands the computing market well given its huge presence in the PC world, and it has key relationships with the enterprises that make up of a lot of the smartphone’s market. In applications, though, HP can truly set itself apart from the other platform providers. Its Webkit-based development tools give HP a path to vast armies of Web developers, all of whom easily could move their HTML skills over to WebOS, Rubinstein said. “If you can do a Website, you can do an app for WebOS,” Rubenstein said.

WebOS today has nowhere near the volumes of apps that Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android or Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) can boast, but Rubinstein said most people use only a core portfolio of 10 to 20 smartphones apps, all of which are available on WebOS today. HP’s task is to encourage the long tail, he said.

HP took over Palm last year in a $1.2 billion deal (CP: HP buys Palm: If Apple can do it, why not HP?) with the aim of turning Palm into its own proprietary smartphone platform, much the way Apple uses iOS. Since then it has announced two smartphones and a tablet running WebOS, the first of which, the Veer, has already launched. Rubinstein HP plans to continue that strategy, but he added that HP would be open to the idea of licensing WebOS to select partners.

Rubinstein hardly gave the impression that HP wants to open the licensing door wide open. A business model like that of Google—which distributes the Android kernel for free—is probably out of the question, since HP ultimately wants to make its money on the devices themselves not services. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) model of licensing Windows Phone 7 for a fee but dictating hardware requirements might be more HP’s speed, but even then Microsoft is accepting all comers. HP probably wants to choose the potential companies it does business with, expanding WebOS’s reach without cannibalizing its own smartphone and tablet sales.