(Associated Press via NewsEdge) Hewlett-Packard unveiled two new mobile phones, pushing deeper into the lucrative cell phone arena and broadening the array of equipment it can sell to large companies.
HP, which supplanted Dell last year as the No. 1 seller of PCs worldwide, is better known for its PCs and extremely profitable printer ink than its handheld devices.
The iPAQ 600 Series Business Navigator looks and functions like a cell phone and includes a navigation feature with 3-D maps. It is 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.
HP unveiled the phones at a major launch in New York. Both run on the latest 3G 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 PDA devices, which still sell briskly, though their popularity is fading in favor of more phone-like gadgets.
HP is a major player in the PDA world, ranking second behind market-leader Palm. in worldwide PDA sales for the first half of 2007, according to market research firm IDC. More than 22% of the 1.6 billion PDAs sold in that period were HP products, according to IDC.
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