HP CEO Meg Whitman has confirmed that HP will not release a new smartphone in 2013. She has previously stated that HP will have to enter the smartphone market again at some point, but apparently not in the next year.

She mad the announcement during a meeting with analysts.

“We don’t have any plans to introduce a smartphone in 2013, but we’ve got to start thinking about what is our unique play, how do we capture this element of the personal computing market?” she said. “I believe that five years from now, if we don’t have a smartphone or whatever the next generation of that device is, we’ll be locked out of a huge segment of the population in many countries of the world.”

At the same time, several reports note that HP has posted 53 job listings for positions that have to do with webOS. The listings are for positions in China and California. The positions include senior Linux software engineers, senior visual designer, senior product manager, and others. It appears that HP intends to heavily support open source webOS but there is no word how they will use it. They could be targeting a wide range of devices that are not mobile, and are very specific to corporate and/or government use. We'll have to wait and see.