I know a lot of you out there will probably remember the Palm Pre and what ultimately became of the company behind the phone, Palm, at the hands of HP. It was a real shame to see such innovation go down like that – especially after they had just launched a decent looking competitor to the iPad, the HP Touchpad. Myself and Mike Corbett both have Touchpads and whilst Mike doesn’t have to use his on a daily basis mine is staring at me lovingly on my desk right now and I’ve honestly never had any problems with it running Ice Cream Sandwich. Except maybe the fact that it’s really, really heavy.
After what we saw the Touchpad could do when running Android a lot of people were wondering whether or not HP would do anything again with either WebOS or something new with Android. Especially considering the fact that the Touchpad started life as an Android tablet before HP even bought Palm. With Microsoft Surface looking set to disrupt the normal model of Microsoft and their OEMs it seems HP could be the one OEM to go a different route. There’s word out that HP are testing an Android-based smartphone codenamed “Bender” and yes, I hope it’s after the Futurama character as well otherwise, that’s just poor taste.
The benchmarks have appeared on the venerable GLBenchmarks website with what looks to be a device packing a dual-core Snapdragon S4 and a 1366×720 display resolution. Whilst the S4 is becoming standard fare for phones these days, that resolution is something we haven’t seen before and it could point to a potential tablet instead.
There’s not a lot of information buzzing around just yet but I’d have to say if it’s gotten to the point of testing like this then it might just come true. It’s not like HP haven’t worked with Qualcomm in the past either – the Touchpad and Pre phones were built using Qualcomm’s processors. I’d love to see HP hit the Android market with something new and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want some of Palm’s DNA in there but sadly, I think those days are long and gone by now.