Hewlett Packard (HP), the world's biggest printing and PC company, has successfully attracted consumers in the printing and PC domain, but in the past, it has struggled in the smartphone arena. Recently, Hewlett Packard's HP's CEO Meg Whitman confirmed in an interview that the company will offer smartphones again, and now analysts reports that HP will "aggressively attack" the smartphone and tablet market.

"We are working on this. In the end, I would love to be able to provide all the way from the most fabulous workstations ... to desktops, to laptops, to our tablets and convertibles, all the way to the smartphone. But we did take a detour into smartphone, and we've gotta get it right this time. So my mantra to the team is 'better right, than faster than we should be' there so we're working to make sure that, when we do this, it will be the right thing for HP and we will be successful," said Whitman in an interview with Fox Business.

A possible HP smartphone was also spotted in GLBenchmark's set of test results. If rumors of the benchmark testing are accurate, then the HP smartphone will include a dual-core Qualcomm S4 processor, clocked at 1.5 GHz. The leak indicated that the purported HP smartphone ran on Android 4.0.4 in the benchmark and included a 1366 x 720 pixel resolution display.

Whitman said in the interview that the company will "have to ultimately offer a smartphone" as people in many countries around the world have a smartphone as the first computing device. Whitman further added that in some countries, people may "never own a tablet or a PC or a desktop, they will do everything on a smartphone."

"We believe HP will aggressively attack the smartphone and tablet markets, which we believe are risky investments." Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said in a research study.

The smartphone and tablet market is flooded with devices from popular brands like Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG, et al. Time will tell if HP can swivel its way in the highly-competitive smartphone market that is inundated with several players.

"While the move makes sense strategically, we see it as a high risk move... We note that to date almost all PC OEMs have failed to gain significant traction in consumer tablets/smartphones," Misek added.